Logoworks is one of the largest logo design firms in the world (acquired by HP in May 2007), and has served over 45,000 small businesses since the company was founded in 2001. I had the opportunity to interview Noelle Bates, the company’s Director of Customer Loyalty, about their “peersourcing” business model, the NIH syndrome, and competing crowdsourcing initiatives.

1. In which way is Logoworks active in the field of open innovation and crowdsourcing?

How Logoworks fulfills on design work is not done by crowdsourcing in the typical sense of the word. We actually call what Logoworks does “peersourcing” because the work isn’t done in the form of a purely open call and the work isn’t done by an undefined group. (Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call.)

To explain, when Morgan Lynch, the founder of Logoworks, began developing his business plan one of the things he wanted to do was bring multiple graphic designers to a single project but he wanted to make it affordable to the customer. He figured the way to do that was to develop a network of pre-screened freelance designers who picked up the design projects at their leisure. The design community is not an open community, it’s a controlled entity called “Arteis.” Arteis started with just a few designers and as the customer base grew we were able to grow the design community through referrals by designers already in Arteis; that is why we called it “peersourcing” - all of the designers in our community were and still are referred by their peers. These designers, once accepted into Arteis, are able to log in to the Arteis portal to see what projects are available and then sign up for the projects in which they are interested. They know exactly what is required for the project and exactly how much they will be paid for their work before they begin on the project.

2. The Not-Invented-Here (NIH) syndrome is seen as a common obstacle in open innovation processes. Could you give 3 practical tips to change a company’s internal mindset to a culture of Proudly-Found-Elsewhere (PFE)? How are you tackling this issue?

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