The emergence of collaborative production “crowdsourcing” or “open invitation” covers a wide range of practices that businesses are now using to create new innovative pathways to market.
Recently, Mountain Dew launched a new contest, a crowdsourcing and marketing campaign called Dew Labs Challenge. After uploading or emailing a short video about why you deserve one of 50 limited-edition DEW lab kits, the winners will be determined and must choose three flavors, one of which will become the next permanent flavor in the DEW lineup.
Using a few charasmatic online personalities to promote the contest, including social media and TV personality Shira Lazar, and independent filmaker (and popular Twitter personality) Jason Pollock, Mountain Dew hopes to build on their successful 2008 DEWmocracy campaign by using crowdsourcing to drive the selection of the next Mountain Dew flavor.
In this new weekly crowdsourcing series, I’ll provide links to resources, research studies and open papers, articles, and blog posts covering a wide range of topics under the “crowdsourcing” umbrella, and further provide examples on how companies are servicing product innovation utilizing external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market.
To start, a working paper from MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence. Enjoy! CCI working paper, Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence.
