How to make money from crowdsourcing: A framework for Crowd Business Models

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I think one of the most valuable aspects of our newly-launched book Getting Results From Crowds is the analysis of Crowd Business Models. While crowdsourcing is clearly a fantastic way for organizations large and small to get access to unparalleled resources and scale their operations, it is also increasingly central to many companies’ business models.

We have created a framework that identifies 7 fundamental crowd business models (plus non-profits), and done an analysis of the monetization mechanisms and success factors behind each one. These provide a broader framework for the 22 categories in version 2 of our Crowdsourcing Landscape.

The Crowd Business Models framework below aggregates these categories. Further details are provided in Chapter 22 of the book on Crowd Business Models. We have chosen to make all of these resources freely available, as we hope they will be useful for those building businesses that are relevant today. Go to the Getting Results From Crowds website for more free chapters and other resources.


Click on the image to download the complete framework as pdf
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Will your privacy completely vanish? It depends how we use facial recognition

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We recently launched our 12 Themes for 2012, shown below, in which the third of the 12 themes is ‘Privacy vanishes’.

2012: 12 Themes

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One of the drivers of privacy vanishing is the rise of facial recognition. As the 2012 themes document notes, while Facebook has prominently launched its facial recognition technology, Apple and Google have facial recognition capabilities that they have not yet launched. The landscape is now changing.
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The realities of intellectual property and crowdsourcing: don’t hold on too tight

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When you talk about crowdsourcing, consistently one of the first objections you hear is worries about losing valuable ideas and intellectual property to unscrupulous overseas contractors.

Our new book Getting Results From Crowds is designed to help people get the most value from crowdsourcing. Part of doing that is giving perspective on the challenges and opportunities of using crowds. In Chapter 4 on When to use crowds, embedded below, one of several free chapters available from book, we discuss Intellectual property and confidentiality and provide a ‘reality check’ on IP protection – see pages 24-25.

Getting Results From Crowds: Chapter 4 – When To Use Crowds
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Many sensors + Imagination = The Internet of Things

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Last week I gave a keynote at the National Broadband Network – what’s in it for me? conference in Bunbury, Western Australia, a town 2 hours south of Perth, the most geographically isolated city in the world. Not surprisingly the hunger for broadband in the region is enormous – you could feel it in the room.

My keynote on The Killer Apps of Connectivity roamed through through some of the killer apps of massive broadband, including work, health, education, media, and new business models. I also spoke about ‘Everything’, in which connectivity is applied to virtually everything around us.


Image source: Application of Cloud Computing to Agriculture and Prospects in Other Fields

One of the domains that is very relevant to the South West region where the conference was held is agriculture. The image above shows the dynamics of a study sponsored by Fujitsu that used rich sensor data to improve practices and yields in rice farming in Japan, while rich sensor data has also been used in wine making, where grapes are highly sensitive to temperature and humidity differences and changes.
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Want to buy drinks for a bunch of Sydney entrepreneurs?

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This is now the thirteenth year that I and some friends have organized the Annual Entrepreneurs and Self-Employed Xmas Drinks in Sydney. The reality is that many who are setting up companies, working solo, or running small businesses don’t have the kinds of Christmas parties that employees of big companies do. So we celebrate together, bringing our teams along.

This year we are running the event adjacent to a launch for my new book Getting Results From Crowds. In the end it wasn’t logistically feasible to run two separate events, and it made sense to do them at the same venue. The book is in any case highly relevant to entrepreneurs.

See the event page for full details, summarized below.
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The future of high-value relationships

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Last week I spoke at the annual meeting of a division of a major bank. It was a one-hour event, with a live audience of several hundred, and a few thousand who worked in other locations watching via a live webcast. Given the pace of change in their business and their overt focus on innovation, they had me speak for 20 minutes on the future, followed by the top two divisional executives for 10 minutes each on what they expect in the business moving forward, then the entire leadership team plus myself up for 20 minutes of Q&A. It was a first for them to use an external speaker for the event, though given the success of the format they will undoubtedly do it again. Bringing external perspectives can be invaluable in stimulating new thoughts on the business and where it can go.

My presentation quickly skimmed through the implications of shifting demographics, work dynamics, social expectations, financial and economic structures, and technology, framed in terms of how to think more openly about possibilities, challenges, and opportunities.

However in the final Q&A session I was asked about the future of business relationships. Given commoditization and competitive pressures, what would happen in relationships?
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Open strategy: News Limited shares its inspirations on the future of paid content

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Early this year I caught up for a coffee with Stephen Browning, Director of Corporate Affairs at News Digital Media and The Australian. During our conversation he told me about a weekly digest of what’s happening globally in digital news and paid content that he compiled for executives at News Limited, to keep them informed about all of many rapid changes in the space.

In the wake of News Limited’s recent blogger briefing on its paywall plan, which showed a dramatically more open attitude than the company had evinced in the past, it is now making its internal business intelligence report available to the general public.

Anyone can sign up for the weekly update at its Future of Journalism site. There is of course no really good reason why a company wouldn’t share with the world its internal business intelligence reports. However the reality is that almost none do. So once again hats off to News Limited for sharing this useful information with the world at large.

Below is the latest update from earlier today, showing the most interesting developments in paid content over the previous week, from the perspective of News Limited. (Apologies if the formatting doesn’t work properly – I just pulled in the HTML.)
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The future of retail: the rise of omnichannel marketing and sales

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This year I have been drawn significantly into the retail industry, being the lead technology advisor for a major study on the long-term future of shopping centers, and giving keynotes at a number of public and in-house retail industry events on topics including the future of retail shopping districts and social media in retail. We are now considering creating a detailed report on strategies for the future of retail next year.

The current edition of Harvard Business Review includes an excellent article titled The Future of Shopping, which echoes many of the themes we are seeing. Its frame of ‘omnichannel retail’ is a useful one.

As it evolves, digital retailing is quickly morphing into something so different that it requires a new name: omnichannel retailing. The name reflects the fact that retailers will be able to interact with customers through countless channels—websites, physical stores, kiosks, direct mail and catalogs, call centers, social media, mobile devices, gaming consoles, televisions, networked appliances, home services, and more. Unless conventional merchants adopt an entirely new perspective—one that allows them to integrate disparate channels into a single seamless omnichannel experience—they are likely to be swept away.

Most retailers think of themselves as primarily physical or online, with just a few thinking far beyond that to creating a fully integrated approach to the customer experience. ‘Clicks and bricks’ is a highly dated view in a world where there is continual channel proliferation.
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Our shrinking degrees of separation: heading down from 6 to 3

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In Chapter 1 of my 2002 book Living Networks I wrote:

When did you last say or hear someone say “what a small world”? People have an unquenchable fascination with how richly we are connected, never ceasing to be amazed by the seeming coincidences of how one friend knows another through a completely different route. Yes, it is a small world, and growing smaller all the time. The well-known phrase “six degrees of separation” suggests that we are connected to every person on the planet by no more than six steps.

After explaining the concept, its origin, and how ‘small world theory’ is helping us to understand the nature of social networks, I continued:

From six degrees, we are moving closer to four degrees of separation from anyone on in the world, with the possible exception of a few isolated tribespeople. We live embedded in an intensely connected world.

That prediction is being borne out today. A paper just submitted to arXiv titled Four Degrees of Separation, says that a study of the entire network of 721 million Facebook users with 69 billion relationship links shows an average distance of 4.74 degrees of separation.

Source: Four Degrees of Separation. Note: it = Italy; se = Sweden; itse = combination of Italy and Sweden; us = USA; fb = all Facebook.
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How governments research and communicate about the future

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Governments around the world are increasingly recognizing that they have a responsibility for structured thought and research about the future, both to shape their own initiatives, and to assist companies and institutions in the nation to survive and thrive in times of change.

Examples of government futures groups include:
Egypt: Center for Futures Studies
France: Centre d’Analyse Stratégique
India: Technology Information, Forecasting and Assessment Council
Indonesia: Badan Perencanaan dan Pembangunan Nasional
Mexico: 2030 Vision
Singapore: Futures Group
Sweden: Institute for Futures Studies
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