Knowledge
Management is a modern day organizational function, which increasingly gained
popularity since the 1990s by significant contributions from prominent business
thinkers like Ikujiro Nonaka, C. K. Prahalad, Gary Hamel, Dorothy Leonard,
Peter Senge and Thomas Davenport among many others. It stressed on the creation
of organizational knowledge from the operations of a company, structuring this
knowledge, making it accessible organization wide and implementing it in
organizational processes, products and services. However, as of late there has
been a tectonic shift in the way companies create knowledge, conduct research,
and make and market their products and services. Previously, organizations used
to look into their R&D departments and their top scientists and researchers
for inspiration and innovation. But with the increasing popularity of the crowdsourcing
model to problem solving and knowledge gathering, KM teams have significantly
transformed the knowledge management processes and systems in place for their
organizations, to tap into a much more rich, dynamic, diverse and insightful
source of knowledge - the crowd.
The
term Crowdsourcing is a relatively new one and its origin is credited to the
article “The Rise of Crowdsourcing” by Jeff Howe in the June 2006 edition of
the Wired magazine. However, the concept of crowdsourcing interestingly dates back
to as early as the 17th century. In the 1800s, the first few
editions of the Oxford dictionary were crowdsourced from volunteer
contributions of definitions, sent on paper slips. With the advent of the
internet, the knowledge available to the general public has tremendously
increased many-fold and the access to actionable information has reached a
point where, searching and finding accurate and relevant information has gained
more significance than being knowledgeable itself. This has been possible not
merely by the work of private corporations or government initiatives but by a
large scale aggregation of individual contributions from among the crowd.
Today, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia has more than 3 million articles in
the English language version alone. This collection is compiled, edited and
maintained by a global community of researchers, academicians, subject matter
experts and others from around the globe. Google uses another form of
crowdsourcing while organizing search results based on the popularity of
different websites, measured by the number of times it was accessed by the
crowd. Therefore, crowdsourcing is an umbrella term, which refers to
application of the wisdom of the crowd, to gain knowledge and to solve problems
worldwide.
So
how is crowdsourcing changing the way we do business? Companies are
increasingly using social networks and online communities not only to gain
knowledge but also to get access to innovative and creative ideas which they
can turn into business opportunities. This has been made possible by the growing
size of the online crowd, thanks to technology. The power of the crowd, which
is larger, more culturally diverse, more experienced and more varying in its
skill-set, literally dwarfs the workforce employed by the organization. With
social technologies and online communities become more and more popular, it has
become easy for people to publish and collaborate with each other. The personal
dimension and visibility that it gives to them has also shed much inhibition
that previously existed in doing so. Hence, given the right conditions to
collaborate and ideate, the crowd can outperform the capabilities of any
organization.
For
the purpose of structuring his SECI model for Knowledge Creation, Ikujiro
Nonaka used the concept of Ba, short for Basho in Japanese which means shared
context in motion. Ba refers to a shared space, in which participants feel
comfortable to collaborate with each other, share knowledge, ideate and
innovate. It can be a physical place like a conference room or a coffee shop,
or it can be virtual in nature like a teleconferencing facility. This concept
is highly important in the crowdsourcing model as well. Hence, the need for
online communities shapes up. Online communities consist of a group of people
who collaborate with each other in areas of mutual interest, over the internet.
Studies have revealed that subject matter experts and enthusiasts are more
committed to their respective communities than they are to their respective organizations.
This is majorly because communities offer them more flexibility and freedom to
develop their ideas and to make contributions, even beyond the boundaries which
their organizations set for them. Hence, what shapes up in the form of an
online community is much more than a bunch of enthusiasts who have similar interests
and tastes. The authenticity of their sense of achievement, their actualization
needs and their raw passion to create and contribute knowledge to the community
is something that no organization can replicate or reproduce. Therefore, to tap
into the power of crowdsourcing, companies must invest in creating virtual Ba-s,
like online discussion forums, community spaces, blogging networks, community
chats, etc, where they can get the crowd to engage in meaningful communication
and collaboration. This would be where the amazing happens.
Finally,
organizations should understand the psyche of the target crowd and should make
visible some benefits that would accompany their association with the company.
For example NASA crowdsources the task of measuring craters on Mars from images
to an online community of astronomy enthusiasts. The crowd performs this task
just as accurately as NASA employees do but only 10 times faster and for free,
solely for the purpose of associating with NASA. Similarly P&G taps into a
crowd of 140,000+ scientists and engineers to source solutions for R&D
problems in the form of a competition. The contestant who contributes the best
solution would be given a reward in the range of $10,000 to $100,000 depending
upon the problem. In both these cases, the crowd is being rewarded for its
services. In the case of NASA, the reward was intangible in nature and in the
case of P&G it was tangible. The key here is not the tangibility of the
reward but how suited and powerful it is in the given context. If the Ba was a
hygiene factor for the crowd to collaborate, the rewards associated with
contributing should serve as a motivator to the crowd.
The
benefits from crowdsourcing are many and are not yet exhaustively realized by
organizations. It already serves as a recession-free tool for knowledge gathering
and ideation for many companies. The crowd is in fact, the perfect resource for
creating knowledge around the products and services offered by any
organization. They belong to a much diverse universe and are associated with products
and services of multiple brands which are further interlinked in complex
scenarios which individual companies could not possibly imagine. In this
context, they are more knowledgeable about the products of an organization than
the organization itself. This combined with the availability of social
platforms to express themselves, has led to the creation of an enormous amount
of crowdsourced knowledge in the internet. Companies which have made this
realization have already benefited immensely from it. HP has solved 50% of its
product related issues across 40 million customers through over 500 million
community posts, thereby contributing an addition $50 million to its top line
since 2009. Starbucks, Dell, Asus and Google invite suggestions online to
improve their customer experience. By means of a brainstorming event, IBM was
able to identify 10 new businesses currently estimated to be worth $100
million. Over 1200 community articles provide 44% customer support for Lenovo
products. These are all examples where organizations have benefited from
crowdsourcing by providing conducive environments for collaboration, rewarding
useful contributions and more importantly, by extending a sense of ownership to
the crowd over the brand name, the products and the services offered by the
company.
The
most amazing feature of crowdsourcing is the transformation in human behavior
that it creates. It brings to the limelight, the rich and tacit knowledge that
exist within individuals combined with their raw desire to collaborate and
contribute. When provided with supportive conditions and motivating environments,
the capabilities of the crowd and their contributions to business would be
beyond anything that organizations would have ever imagined. Crowdsourcing is
not without its share of problems and critics. But nevertheless it is proof
that moving forward Knowledge Management processes in organizations would only
become more social and collaborative in nature.
