Crowdcasting

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Crowdcasting is the combination of broadcasting and crowdsourcing. The process of crowdcasting uses a combination of push and pull strategies first to engage an audience and build a network of participants and then harness the network for new insights. Those insights are then used to shape broadcast programming. These insights and concepts can include new product ideas, new service ideas, new branding messages, or even scientific breakthroughs. These insights are extracted from participants' submissions.

Contents

Push

The 'push' aspects of crowdcasting involve a public announcement of a prize for a particular innovation, invention, achievement, or accomplishment (such as the announcement of the Ansari X-Prize in 1996). This stage of crowdcasting serves to engage a specific target audience using compelling offerings or incentives as a call to action.

Pull

The 'pull' aspects of crowdcasting involve building and harnessing a community of passionate participants. Crowdcasting competitions have a viral effect, as interested participants refer others to the event. Once the community is built, it can be harnessed to provide fresh perspectives, ideas, insights, prototypes, or radical breakthrough innovations. InnoCentive is an example; its challenges tap into a community of over 100,000 scientists who might provide that unexpected innovation.

Openpitch.com [1] an upstart, has embraced the concept of crowdcasting to form a virtual advertising agency. The fundamental concept of crowdcasting—harnessing a specific, often expert, community of participants—separates OpenPitch from user-generated content (UGC) sites. Much like Innocentive, OpenPitch does not share or post submissions to the overall community during development. Instead, the sites keep user submissions confidential, protecting the intellectual property rights of both the posting company and the solutions provider. What is lost by not following a more open crowdsourcing model is gained by a policy that, arguably, attracts a more professional, dedicated user base.

Crowdcasting in action

Aside from the advertising space, the merger of crowdsourcing with broadcast programming has been largely unexplored. One of the first to launch a "crowdcasting" application allowing listeners to take control of a radio station is LDR / "Listener Driven Radio". [2] "Listener Driven Radio" is a software application that allows listeners to go online, or to their mobile phone, and offer their input into what plays next on the radio station. The program constantly absorbs listener input, song votes, and comments on music and automatically adapts radio station programming in real-time. Clear Channel Communications, Cox Media Group, CBS, Cumulus, Harvard Broadcasting, and many major broadcasters in the USA, Canada, and Europe are using Listener Driven Radio's technology to give audiences the ability to influence on-air programming.

Internet-based crowdcasting

Crowdcasting is also no longer confined to traditional broadcasting platforms due to current technological advances. For instance, there is the case of the Internet-based platforms, which feature convenient and automated capabilities for collecting, storing, and analyzing data. This is demonstrated in the platform created by Salesforce for Starbucks, the crowdsourcing solution enables the coffee chain to source ideas from its customers through suggestions for improvements in their outlets. [3] The same strategy has been employed by companies like Amazon, Philips, LG, and Forbes when they use CrowdSpring to search for new creative ideas. [3] Startups like Elance also integrate crowdcasting into their operations as a value-added service.

The social media is another example of an Internet-based crowdcasting platform. This can be the case once an organization taps it to enable stakeholders to self-organize as a crowd so that content about the organization can be produced and disseminated. [4] Here, the 'push' and 'pull' strategies are employed when engaging a community of stakeholders and building a network of participants ('push'), which is then harnessed to gain insights ('pull'). [4]

Differences

John Seely-Brown and John Hagel III discuss the transition from 'push' to 'pull' innovation this way: "Rather than treating producers as passive consumers whose needs can be anticipated and shaped by centralized decision-makers, pull models treat people as networked creators even when they actually are customers purchasing goods and services. Pull platforms harness their participants’ passion, commitment, and desire to learn, thereby creating communities that can improvise and innovate rapidly." [5]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Broadcasting</span> Distribution of audio or audiovisual content to dispersed audiences

Broadcasting is the distribution of audio or video content to a dispersed audience via any electronic mass communications medium, but typically one using the electromagnetic spectrum, in a one-to-many model. Broadcasting began with AM radio, which came into popular use around 1920 with the spread of vacuum tube radio transmitters and receivers. Before this, all forms of electronic communication were one-to-one, with the message intended for a single recipient. The term broadcasting evolved from its use as the agricultural method of sowing seeds in a field by casting them broadly about. It was later adopted for describing the widespread distribution of information by printed materials or by telegraph. Examples applying it to "one-to-many" radio transmissions of an individual station to multiple listeners appeared as early as 1898.

Topcoder is a crowdsourcing company with an open global community of designers, developers, data scientists, and competitive programmers. Topcoder pays community members for their work on the projects and sells community services to corporate, mid-size, and small-business clients. Topcoder also organizes the annual Topcoder Open tournament and a series of smaller regional events.

Collaborative intelligence characterizes multi-agent, distributed systems where each agent, human or machine, is autonomously contributing to a problem solving network. Collaborative autonomy of organisms in their ecosystems makes evolution possible. Natural ecosystems, where each organism's unique signature is derived from its genetics, circumstances, behavior and position in its ecosystem, offer principles for design of next generation social networks to support collaborative intelligence, crowdsourcing individual expertise, preferences, and unique contributions in a problem solving process.

LIVE365 is an Internet radio network where users are able to create their own online radio stations, or choose to listen to thousands of human curated stations. LIVE365 is unique because online radio stations on the LIVE365 network were created and managed by music and talk enthusiasts, including both hobbyists and professional broadcasters. LIVE365 also has many well established AM and FM stations that utilized the LIVE365 broadcasting platform to simulcast their terrestrial radio streams via the Live365 distribution network. The Live365 network also features radio stations from well-known artists such as Johnny Cash, David Byrne, Pat Metheny, Jethro Tull, Frank Zappa, and more. LIVE365 was created in 1999, and remains one of the longest running internet radio websites for listeners and broadcasters.

Open innovation is a term used to promote an information age mindset toward innovation that runs counter to the secrecy and silo mentality of traditional corporate research labs. The benefits and driving forces behind increased openness have been noted and discussed as far back as the 1960s, especially as it pertains to interfirm cooperation in R&D. Use of the term 'open innovation' in reference to the increasing embrace of external cooperation in a complex world has been promoted in particular by Henry Chesbrough, adjunct professor and faculty director of the Center for Open Innovation of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citizen media</span> Journalistic content produced by private citizens who are not professional journalists

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crowdsourcing</span> Sourcing services or funds from a group

Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.

Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community that pioneered the technology to tap crowds for the best software ideas. To power open innovation in other businesses, they developed a crowdsourcing platform Chaordix – the technology to harness a crowd for breakthrough ideas.

InnoCentive is an open innovation and crowdsourcing company with its worldwide headquarters in Waltham, MA and their EMEA headquarters in London, UK. They enable organizations to put their unsolved problems and unmet needs, which are framed as ‘Challenges’, out to the crowd to address. In the case of InnoCentive, the crowd can either be external or internal. Awards, typically monetary, are given for submissions that meet the requirements set out in the Challenge description. The average award amount for a Challenge is $20,000 but some offer awards of over $100,000. To date, InnoCentive have run over 2,000 external Challenges and over 1,000 internal Challenges, awarding over $20 million in the process.

The URBAN AND REGIONAL INNOVATION Research (URENIO) is a university lab in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, School of Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. URENIO is a non-profit research organization that started its operation in 1995. URENIO is mainly involved in competitive projects from the European R&D Framework Programs (FP), the Competitiveness and Innovation Program (CIP), the territorial cooperation programs, the OECD, and the United Nations.

Innovation management is a combination of the management of innovation processes, and change management. It refers to product, business process, marketing and organizational innovation. Innovation management is the subject of ISO 56000 series standards being developed by ISO TC 279.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social collaboration</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jelli</span> Radio advertising technology firm

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Citizen sourcing is the government adoption of crowdsourcing techniques for the purposes of (1) enlisting citizens in the design and execution of government services and (2) tapping into the citizenry's collective intelligence for solutions and situational awareness. Applications of citizen sourcing include:

Crowdsourcing software development or software crowdsourcing is an emerging area of software engineering. It is an open call for participation in any task of software development, including documentation, design, coding and testing. These tasks are normally conducted by either members of a software enterprise or people contracted by the enterprise. But in software crowdsourcing, all the tasks can be assigned to or are addressed by members of the general public. Individuals and teams may also participate in crowdsourcing contests.

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Patexia Inc. is a privately held intellectual property (IP) company based in Santa Monica, California, U.S. The company was founded in 2010 with the mission to enhance transparency and efficiency in the IP field through a leveraging of the knowledge of an IP-based online community of researchers, attorneys, and stakeholders—described by the company as a “multidisciplinary social network”—for the purpose of information crowdsourcing. In addition, the company combines patent and litigation databases to provide analytical tools regarding the IP field, including the details of attorneys, law firms, companies, and examiners, for its community members.

References

  1. "The Department of the 4th Dimension". Openpitch.com. Retrieved 2013-09-15.
  2. "Interactive Broadcasting | Turning Broadcasts Into Crowdcasts | LDR | LDR Interactive Solutions for Broadcasters". Listenerdrivenradio.com. Retrieved 2013-09-15.
  3. 1 2 Cunha-Cruz, Maria Manuela (2012). Handbook of Research on Business Social Networking: Organizational, Managerial, and Technological Dimensions: Organizational, Managerial, and Technological Dimensions. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. p. 792. ISBN   9781613501689.
  4. 1 2 Cornelissen, Joep (2017). Corporate Communication: A Guide to Theory and Practice. London: SAGE. p. 40. ISBN   9781473953697.
  5. McKinsey Quarterly 2005, #3 "From push to pull: The next frontier of innovation"