If Peter, Arjen or Simone are interested in a discussion it would be my pleasure.

John Delaney
CEO
Intrade

At this moment I started writing my masterthesis on your second point: Crowdstorming, to let the crowd give suggestions to organizations how to improve business and interact with employees of an organization to improve interaction and diversity of opinions,to come to more creative ideas.

I would be very interested in reading your thesis.

please contact me at arjen_brasz AT hotmail DOT com

Is there anyway we can come in contact and for me to read your thesis?

I’m currently working on my Bsc thesis Human Technology on the implementation of an open innovation platform for small and middle sized businesses.

The company that serves as a case for my research has the highest quality standards and wants to ‘co-create’ with there customers and be totaly open about there products and methods.

I would be very interested in your view and work in this area.

you can reach me by sending a mail to info (at) joom dot nl. (Hope this keeps the spammers away)

Hope to hear from you,

Peter B.

You ask: “do you want to use crowdsourcing as a business model for a start-up or new business unit?” In my view, there another question that needs to be answered, namely ‘which business model should be used?’. I have found that crowdsourcing is not one business model, but a collection of business models. Categorizing the examples according to the way crowdsourcing is used (instead of the type of task or the type of organization) can help to better understand the possibilities of crowdsourcing. Because: Is Threadless, which uses the crowd for its own purposes, that different from 99designs, where other companies are the ones to directly benefit from the crowd? Or is openstreetmap, which uses crowdsourcing as their core business model, that different from TomTom, which uses crowdsourcing complementary to their other activities? And how are they different from YouTube or Wikipedia, where the crowd is also used to produce content?

In my thesis, I have used the work of Jeff Howe as a basis for my classification, but adapted it such that the crowdsourcing types would represent different ways of using the crowd, representing different business models.

1. Crowdcasting, in which a particular challenge is broadcasted to the crowd, generally organized as a competition with a financial reward. InnoCentive, Threadless, 99designs, and GoldCorp all belong to this type.

2. Crowdstorming, which involves an online brainstorming session, where interaction between participants is important. In many cases, this involves a company asking the crowd for ideas. An example of this type is Dell’s IdeaStorm.

3. Crowd production, in which the crowd produces content for a website or database. Typical examples of this type are Wikipedia and iStockPhoto.

4. Crowdfunding, where instead of the spare time, abilities and knowledge of the crowd, their spare money is used. Examples are Sellaband, MyFootballClub and Kiva.

Although variations within these types are possible, I think this classification provides a useful perspective for analysing existing examples and possible applications for existing companies.