Crowdsourcing starts to clear awaycorporate cobwebs
By Joe McKendrick | May 16, 2012,
Since it entered the popular imagination, crowdsourcing has been seen as an approach forbringing in ideas from the world outside corporate walls.
Now, crowdsourcing is becoming amainstream business practice, and in
many cases, it‟s unfolding is as an
internal activity targeted at bringingemployees into the businessdecision-making process. Strategicplanning is unfolding as the areaparticularly well suited forcrowdsourcing.In a newreport
,McKinsey‟s Arne
Gast and Michele Zaninishowdescribes how crowdsourcing isworking its way into the decision-making processes of leadingcorporations. What a great way toshake up calcified or biased planning processes, they observe. Enhancedemployee engagement leads to greater financial health, Gast and
Zaninishow add. However, they state, it‟s important that middle
managers be sold on the process as well.
Gast and Zaninishow describe some mainstream corporatecrowdsourcing initiatives:
Rite-Solutions,
a software provider for the US Navy, defensecontractors, and emergency responders, developed an internal stock
exchange called “Mutual Fun.” With this stock exchange, “would
-be
entrepreneurs” can pitch internal „IPOs‟ and sell stock at $10 a share upto $10,000 in play money. “When an IPO gains momentu
m and breaks
into the company‟s Top 20, the initiative is funded with seed money.”
The company has surfaced 15 new ideas as a result of its internal IPOsystem.
HCL Technologies,
the IT services and software-development companyopened up its business-planning process, which formerly involved a fewhundred top executives, into an online platform open to more than 8,000employees across the organizations.
“A surge of advice followed. The
inclusive nature of the process helped identify specific ideas for cross-unit collaboration and gave business leaders a chance to obtain detailedand actionable feedback from interested individuals across the
company.” Knowing their documents would be open to scrutiny,
managers prepared more honest and action-oriented documents.
Red Hat,
the open-source platform company, employed wikis andcollaborative tools for its planning process, to generate and organizeideas so that any employee could respond with comments orsuggestions. Gast and Zaninishow observe that the new process resulted
in a “significant change in the way the company offers virtualizationservices for enterprise data centers and desktop computer applications” —
and even resulted in a new corporate acquisition. This type of move
“would have been unlikely in the d
ays when the company used its old,
less inclusive planning process.”
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