New term, possibly new paradigm and new business opportunity. According with Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, Crowdsourcing is “ when a company takes a job that was once performed by employees and outsources in the form of an open call to a large undefined group of people generally using the internet”

That definition implies that companies rely more on its customer on the process of creating, designing, choosing and launching a product. It´s like Company X has a problem and decide to ask to the”online crowd” what the best solution is. This simple but powerful idea has serious implications like more access to wide range of talent that is outside the organization, opportunity to find creative and innovative ideas, more opportunities to get first-hand insight on customer´s desires, resolve problems in a cost-effective way, and empower the crowd to feel owners of the organization.

Let´s change the name Company X for a real one. For example, Unilever is offering $10,000 in a competition to find ideas for its next TV campaign for snack food Peperami, using the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty. This kind of measure imposes new challenges and new threats for current actors, in this case, Lowe, the marketing agency with whom Unilever was working since 1993 was taken out of this project. Is this the future of marketing? What will happen with existing marketing agencies?

A crowdsourcing project, like others project could fail. It´s difficult to control a crowd, and remember that this customer are not employees of the companies, probably there is not written agreement, so if there is not sufficient and clear leadership by the company the project may turn out of control. Besides, this kind of initiatives demand a lot of time, attention and communication skills. Also, keep the crowd motivated is another big issue, because motivation drives to quality, therefore, the company must define clear and attractive incentives to the winner(s).

Looking for more initiatives but more directly related with our current career, it can be found that this year was launched BBNM CrowdConsulting with the goal of resolving real and current business problem. Undoubtedly, this approach will propitiate a closer link between companies, students and universities which are participating. FIU must form this kind of alliances with other universities or we´ll just start loosing ground. Is doing FIU something like this? Is this in its future plans?.