Innovation is a very important term in the corporate world. After all, the most successful corporations in the world are those that lead the charge when it comes to creating innovative new products and services. However, the way that these products and services are coming to life is evolving quickly.
Here’s How Views Toward Innovation Are Changing
As mentioned above, the way large corporations go about innovation is changing in a big way. Innovation used to be about ideas and concepts created by business leaders or hired professionals. However, today, innovation is being led by customers, employees and others that are willing to give their insights. Today, we’re moving away from the idea of singular innovation and toward the idea of crowdsourced innovation.
Corporate crowdsourcing has been the driving force behind some of the biggest changes that we’ve seen across some of our favorite brands. With the help of innovation management softwares like Qmarkets, even massive tech companies that are driven by innovation are changing their approach. A great example of one of these companies is Samsung.
How Samsung’s Path Toward Innovation Has Changed
Samsung is one of the largest, most innovative and most successful companies in the world. As such, it’s not surprising that the company was one of the first to take advantage of the path toward innovation, known as crowdsourcing.
The idea behind crowdsourcing is a relatively simple one. By allowing customers, employees and external stakeholders of a business to provide their views with regard to products and features, corporations can come up with innovative new ideas that are targeted to meet the exact needs that their customers have expressed.
In the case of Samsung, the company currently operates one of the largest crowdsourcing facilities in the world. Ultimately, they use input from the masses to come up with innovative solutions for their existing electronic products and technologies.
Most notably, in 2013, Samsung launched one of its first crowdsourced innovation campaigns. During the campaign, the company created a competition offering up a price of $10,000. Essentially, the company allowed anyone who wanted to offer insight the ability to give their ideas with regard to how the company could apply thin, bendy or even foldable displays within the marketplace. These ideas drove much of the concepts behind the unique displays that Samsung users are still enjoying to this day.
Why This New Form Of Innovation Is Proving To Be So Successful
When we thought of innovation, we often thought about the great minds of the world coming up with great concepts. However, there’s somewhat of a problem with this idea. The truth of the matter is that even the greatest minds in the world have created products and services that weren’t taken well by consumers. Nonetheless, the shift that we’re seeing in innovation is that the approach is becoming more consumer-centric.
Think about it, consumers are the people that purchase the products that make these great companies what they are. So, with the new crowdsourced approach, consumers are helping to come up with the ideas. This is a monumental change. After all, it’s no longer guess work to figure out if consumers will like the products that are being created. Because the consumers who will be buying the products and services were part of creating it and voting for the concept to go from concept to product, before the product is ever created, companies know that consumers are interested in purchasing them.
Final Thoughts
The key takeaway here is a relatively simple one. Innovation drives businesses, and thanks to crowdsourcing technology, the world of innovation is changing. Companies are now capable of innovating new products and services for a fraction of the cost as professionals are not needed quite as much. Moreover, through the new view of innovation, corporations are able to know for a certainty that consumers will be interested in their products before those products go from concept to reality. All in all, crowdsourcing and tools like it are propelling innovation forward at an incredible rate. So, if you haven’t started to consider crowdsourcing for your business, you may want to think about it.
