Exploring barriers and opportunities in adopting crowdsourcing based new product development in manufacturing SMEs

Abstract

Abstract:Crowdsourcing is an innovative business practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content or even funds by soliciting contributions from a large group of people (the 'Crowd'). The potential benefits of utilizing crowdsourcing in product design are well-documented, but little research exists on what are the barriers and opportunities in adopting crowdsourcing in New Product Development (NPD) of manufacturing SMEs. In order to answer the above questions, a Proof of Market study is carried out on crowdsourcing-based product design under an Innovate UK funded Smart project, which aims at identifying the needs, challenges and future development opportunities associated with adopting crowdsourcing strategies for NPD. The research findings from this study are reported here and these research findings can be used to guide future development of crowdsourcing-based collaborative design methods and tools and provide some practical references for industry to adopt this new and emerging collaborative design method in their business.

A Systematic Review of the Literature on Open Innovation in SMEs

“…Related to this challenge is the observation by Huggins and Johnston (2009) and Bianchi et al (2010) that SMEs are too focused on their core business and typically lack a systematic innovation process leaving them challenged with respect to grasping and exploiting new technological developments accessed through OI relations. Qin et al (2016) explore the challenges related to adoption of crowdsourcing activity. Deschamps et al (2013) analyze various challenges faced by SMEs in managing collaborations with the universities and subsequent technology transfer issues.…”

Emotional Crowdsourcing Tool Design for Product Development: A Case Study Using Local Crowds

“…In summary, this paper demonstrates (1) what are design processes to follow for emotional design, (2) what are emotions and corresponding design features could be used for a crowdsourcing platform to support a product design, and 3what are common interaction tools which should have emotional design features. Through the case study, we have answered the above questions and gained better understanding of a crowdsourcing platform for product design.…”

“…During this second stage, we spent four workshops to explore (1) what are emotions that could be embedded in a crowdsourcing platform (2) what are key problems along a project development line and 3what are key functions/tools needed for solving the problems. Most of participants know crowdsourcing systems such as Amazon MTurk, and Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs based problem-solving styles.…”

“…One of the key enabling technologies is crowdsourcing-based digital platform for product design and development. However, existing crowdsourcing platforms for product design have some barriers for design and manufacturing businesses to adopt them in practice [1]. The main barriers are (1) effective involvement with crowd-workers and field experts, (2) the designers' trust of problem-solving ability and quality on a platform, and (3) the users' enjoyment of using such a platform (the users here refer to both the designers and crowd-workers).…”

Key Crowdsourcing Technologies for Product Design and Development

“…Crowdsourcing [5] offers an opportunity for SMEs to get access to online communities who may provide requested services such as generating design ideas or problem solutions. Qin Quora [48] , the category of idea platforms in [8], ideascale [49] , social media like WeChat, Facebook, Email, etc.…”