Crowdsourcing Is A Boring Title For A Blog

When a company uses crowdsourcing to develop a community driven product, they can achieve certain benefits compared to the traditional product development process.


First, a great benefit of having users design a product is that they are essentially working for free, and you don't have to hire any designers.  Many people in the case of designing things do so as a hobby and it is fun for them.  Taking advantage of a large group of people who does things for fun (like designing shirts) can achieve high quaility submissions equivalent to that of a professional.  If it was building cars or rockets, this would not work very well, but for something that is a hobby of many such as drawing, writing, or playing music, it could achieve good results.


Another benefit besides submission ideas, is the community aspect of weeding out the bad ideas and highlighting the good ones.  The community is again working for free, and the community is the actual market.  Therefore you are creating a product that the consumers want, and not just using a push strategy to come up with shirts that you think they will like.


The main problem with crowdsourcing comes if the market is not trained well in a certian field, or doesn't have much knowledge of a subject.  As described before with the rocket designing example, a traditional product design featuring experts would be the best way to serve the market.  The rocket designers would conduct market research and speak with the market to find what they want, which costs time and money.  In that regard, crowdsourcing could be considered a free form of market research.