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The Re-Birth of Crowdsourcing: Profiling Crowds by Their Innovation Skills

Posted by on 05 May 2015
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Q: What was the
inspiration for the Swarm Enterprise Profiler?

A: I noticed the
crowd was not amorphous. There were distinct skill groups.

The idea really came to me while I was running large
innovation crowdsourcing projects for our clients. I noticed that there were
really distinct types of people in the crowd. Some put enormous energy into
expressing their ideas, with elaborate illustrations and videos that were
really impressive. But with all of that focus on their creative craft, these
entries often did not contain a fundamentally novel solution to the problem.

We also got all kinds of very incremental ideas. And noticed
that a large part of any crowd didn't submit any ideas at all. But they were super active in commenting or
voting on ideas.

So I set about to write down my hypotheses and test them. In
true Lean Start Up style, I started with $100 and a sample of about 100 people.
Over the subsequent year, we ran several larger, much more costly studies, with
correlation coefficients, regression analysis and factor analysis ' all that
fun stuff. It turns out that our
hypotheses were true, the four skills groups are real, and they are very distinct
from each other. We can identify them pretty quickly now, in just 17 questions.

What's really gratifying is that, once we ran crowd
campaigns on SwarmVision, we could see how people actually behaved. It turns
out that Ideators really are about 50% more prolific in generating ideas. Their
ideas are more likely to be rated highly by Experts and Judges, and more likely
to be tagged as 'Revolutionary' by objective moderators. Influentials are 50%
more likely to vote and comment on ideas. We organize these groups into a
workflow that dramatically improves their experience, and the quality of the
ideas. This is a non-trivial improvement on crowdsourcing that we're really
proud of.
Once we saw these results, we really knew we were on to
something important. So we began our work to develop the internal solution for
our clients, the Swarm Enterprise Profiler

You can see, and even take the Crowd Profiler yourself, at www.swarmvision.com

Contact: Suzan@totembrand.com Suzan Briganti, CEO, Totem Inc.

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