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Tuesday 8 October 2013

Week 6: Crowdfunding Network



Before starting to talk about crowd sourcing itself, its damages and benefits in design, let's first find a definition and try to explain why people or designers choose crowd sourcing to improve their business activity.

So, crowd sourcing can be defined as "the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers." [1]

What does it mean? It means that the individual or group of people working on a project, choose to gather some ideas and further help from other individuals (most of the times experts) that are linked to an online community. Therefore, this can be viewed also as an alternative way to spend as less as possible, reaching the deadlines, increasing flexibility and mobility of operation in general in today’s competitive business environment.

Typically, by online communities it is meant forums or websites that work for the individual as a platform. By choosing these sites that offer different packages and formats to put together contests, foundations or companies have various ways of expressing their ideas and their needs.

Those companies that are seriously working in developing their business and know exactly what they want to receive, can choose the best settings to meet their requirements and needs and even post their goals/tasks with description and in detail at the websites to open contests and invite submissions.

Hence, my question is: Might every business developer go for crowd sourcing to improve their design and be known by the others as fast as possible?

On the one hand, the answer is yes because it is possible to choose the amount of money that an individual wants to spend. It means that you know exactly how much you will be paying for design / graphics work. Hence, this is really good for those that have to start with very limited budgets and in particular it could be a really good way to save the money.

Secondly, if a company has to set a very strict deadline for a design project, crowd sourcing could be the solution to see the results on time. Once every aspect and priority has been settled up, online communities can start to help you as soon as possible and this is great since a lot of work and especially time can be saved.