Join the crowd

You can imagine that in this job I get a lot of press releases hitting by Inbox every day, announcing new products, new appointments, new projects and the like. But every so often you see one that peeks your attention that little bit more, as was the case recently with “Siemens PLM Software & Local Motors Form Partnership Around Solid Edge and Revolutionary Crowdsourcing Design Approach”.

Crowdsourcing? Interesting. It's one of those newer terms that I had been dimly aware of but can't say I really knew too much about, especially in terms of real-life applications of the approach of asking a largely unknown group of people to perform a task or solve a particular problem. Incidentally, derived from “crowd” plus “outsourcing”, it first appeared in a Wired magazine article in 2006, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing”.

There really do seem to have been quite a few useful examples of applying the wisdom of the crowd. In the Goldcorp Challenge, Canadian mining company Goldcorp offered up its geophysical data for Ontario online and asked the crowd to predict where the next gold discovery would be. The result was the discovery of eight million ounces of gold worth US$3 billion based on the submissions, and an estimated two to three years of exploration time saved.

And in the wake of last year's oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, BP invited the public to submit their ideas how to effectively clean up the millions of barrels of oil that had leaked out into the water and onto shorelines. Out of the 43,000 ideas received, some 470 were given a more detailed review and around 30 were actually put to use. BP said that the crowdsourcing initiative had “leveraged the public's ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit”.

The Siemens PLM Software/Local Motors case is a co-creation application of crowdsourcing. Local Motors is a US vehicle manufacturer that develops vehicles by leveraging on the ideas of its open design community to which any interested individual is invited to join. Its Rally Fighter, the first result of this approach, is said to be the world's first open source production vehicle. And for its new Open Electric Vehicle Project, the company is adopting Siemens' Solid Edge CAD software and recommending the same to its entire design community.

With everyone so hyper connected these days, the crowdsourcing approach to design and problem solving represents a viable way for companies to tap into the huge amount of untapped talent out there and increase consumer engagement, although to make it work effectively does require a structured process to handle and sift through the ideas of potentially thousands of disparate individuals. Then it can really be a fruition of two heads are better than one, rather than a case of too many cooks spoil the broth.

On that note, as we send the final issue of Control Engineering Asia of 2011 off to the press, it's perhaps appropriate to say that I look forward to receiving more of your comments, contributions and questions. All of us on the team here would also like to acknowledge our readers, advertisers, and event partners for your fine and continued support during the year. And we look forward to welcoming you back in 2012. Thank you!