Dissertation crowdsourcing implementation in high tech organisations. differences and similarities

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE DEGREE IN

MSC INNOVATION, CREATIVITY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Crowdsourcing implementation in high-tech organisations: Differences and similarities.

A case study on the higher education and healthcare industry and perspectives from students and young

professionals

By Cristian Ioan Scarlat

Student No: 130593041

Newcastle University Business School

September 2014

ContentsAcknowledgements....................................................................................................................................................3

Abstract......................................................................................................................................................................4

1. INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................................................................5

1.1. Objectives and research questions.............................................................................................................5

2. LITERATURE REVIEW...........................................................................................................................................6

2.1. Main definitional considerations:...............................................................................................................6

2.2. Crowdsourcing implementation.................................................................................................................6

2.2.1. In higher education.............................................................................................................................8

2.2.2. In the healthcare sector......................................................................................................................9

2.3. Benefits.......................................................................................................................................................9

2.3.1. In higher education...........................................................................................................................10

2.3.2. In the healthcare sector....................................................................................................................10

2.4. Challenges and Limitations.......................................................................................................................11



2.5. Strategies to overcome the challenges and limitations............................................................................14



2.6. Students and young professional’s perspectives......................................................................................16

3. METHODOLOGY................................................................................................................................................16

3.1. Research design........................................................................................................................................17

3.2. Data collection..........................................................................................................................................17

3.2.1. Ethical considerations.......................................................................................................................18

3.3. Data analysis.............................................................................................................................................18

3.4. Samples.....................................................................................................................................................19

3.5. Measurements..........................................................................................................................................20

4. FINDINGS..........................................................................................................................................................21

4.1. Case study I: The UC-Crowd Project..........................................................................................................21

4.1.1. Implementation................................................................................................................................21

4.1.2. Benefits.............................................................................................................................................22

4.1.3. Challenges.........................................................................................................................................23

4.2. Case study II: QuantuMDx........................................................................................................................23

4.2.1. Implementation................................................................................................................................24

4.2.2. Benefits.............................................................................................................................................25

4.2.3. Challenges.........................................................................................................................................26

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4.3. Students and young professionals’ perspective........................................................................................26

4.3.1. Motivational factors..........................................................................................................................27

4.3.2. Quality control..................................................................................................................................27

4.3.3. Crowdfunding...................................................................................................................................28

4.3.4. Collaborative-competitive environment...........................................................................................28

5. DISSCUSSIONS...................................................................................................................................................28

5.1. Case study I: The UC-Crowd Project..........................................................................................................28

5.2. Case study II: QuantuMDx........................................................................................................................29

5.3. Students and young professional’s perspectives......................................................................................31

6. CONCLUSION....................................................................................................................................................32

7. LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH.............................................................................................................32

8. Reference list....................................................................................................................................................34

9. APPENDICES......................................................................................................................................................38

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost I would like to thank my family for supporting me throughout this research. They have been a great source of inspiration and motivation. Special thanks to my sister Ela Madalina Scarlat for

helping me transcribe some of the interviews.

I would also like to give me special appreciation to my supervisor Eftychia Palamida, who guided me in the process and brought me back on track with the work.

I own a special thanks to Fiona Whitehurst and Jacqueline Curtis for introducing me to the two organisations in my research, without who I would have struggled longer to gain access.

And of course many thanks to Heinze Aleksej, Elaine Warburton and Maggie Love for kindly accepting to participate in my research and thus helping me to bring it to successful completion.

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AbstractCrowdsourcing is an internet tool that leverages the diversity of knowledge and expertise of an undefined pool of workers. This study focuses on presenting the opportunities in the field and touch upon the pitfalls, trying to find the particular strategies that are used by companies to overcome the limitations. It will look into two case studies in the higher education and healthcare sector to analyse the way crowdsourcing is implemented, followed by the views of students and young professionals acting as the crowd of labour.

Key words: crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, diversity of ideas, quality control, reward system, creativity, innovation, collaboration, value co-creation, entrepreneurship, online community

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1. INTRODUCTION The term “crowdsourcing” has been popularized by Howe (2006, cited in Djelassi and Decoopman, 2013) which defined it as the act of a company outsourcing an in-house function to a large undefined network of people in the form of an open call. In other words, a model of access to user-driven innovation. It can take the form of peer-production, where the job is collaboratively sourced, but it can also be performed by sole individuals, experts or non-experts. It is believed that crowdsourcing holds entrepreneurial logic.

Crowdsourcing implementation is little understood, although due to the shift towards open innovation, more and more companies explore it as it grows in importance. Tasks include activities such as designing, creating, and testing products, voting for best results, or organizing information.

The ultimate benefit for crowdsourcing is the access to an enormous pool of competence and knowledge from an online community that stretched from all parts of the world, coming from possibly all fields of expertise, with a high cost cutting potential compared to hiring dedicated professionals. It can prove a faster development of innovation where users are co-creators of value. On the other hand, crowdsourcing can prove difficult to implement due to the fact that there is very large scale of workers to manage, the filtering of content can prove costly and time consuming, there is a risk for malicious attacks and loss of intellectual property, as well as other considerations of legal framework conditions.

After careful analysis, there has been identified a gap in the literature on the strategies that companies implement to overcome the limitations of this new internet tool for labour. This will be explored within the literature review and compared with the reality of context that the sampled companies faced. This research will try to extend the core benefits and difficulties identified in previous research.

The first section of the research will focus on the literature review, considering the benefits and challenges, as well as strategies to overcome the challenges from the view of mainstream crowdsourcing, and also touching upon the higher education and healthcare sector. This will be followed by the perspective on the subject of students and young professionals. Following will be the methodology chapter in which there will be an outline of the methods, philosophies and nature of the research. The findings will exemplify the results of the research, which will be analysed in the discussions chapter. The limitations and future research guidance will follow, and the study will end with the conclusion.

1.1. Objectives and research questionsThe purpose of this present study is to extend the core benefits and difficulties identified in previous research. The following research questions will be proposed to attempt to fill in the gaps in the literature:

Why do high-tech organisations implement crowdsourcing activities? What are the benefits? What are the difficulties? What strategies do they use to overcome these difficulties?

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2. LITERATURE REVIEW Brabham (2008a, cited in Brabham, 2010) identifies crowdsourcing as a problem posted by a company online, to which a number of individuals (the crowd) come up with solutions, where the best ideas are rewarded, and the company mass-produces the idea for its own profits.

2.1. Main definitional considerations:Table 1. shows the main definitions found in the crowdsourcing literature.

Table 1.

Year

Author Definition

2013 Di Guardo and Castriotta

The term crowdsourcing describes a new web-based business model that harnesses the creative solutions of a distributed network of individuals through what amounts to an open call for proposals. In other words, a company posts a problem online and a vast number of individuals offer solutions to the problem. However, the proliferation of such technologies necessitates a deep change on the organization of innovation activities in order to understanding what types of collective intelligence are possible (or not), desirable (or not) and affordable (or not) and under what conditions.

2012 Estelles-Arolas and Gonzalez-Ladron-de-Guevara

Crowdsourcing is a type of participative online activity in which an individual, an institution, a non-profit organization, or company proposes to a group of individuals of varying knowledge, heterogeneity, and number, via a flexible open call, the voluntary undertaking of a task. The undertaking of the task, of variable complexity and modularity, and in which the crowd should participate bringing their work, money, knowledge and/ or experience, always entails mutual benefit. The user will receive satisfaction of a given type of need, be it economic, social recognition, self-esteem, or the development of individual skills, while the crowdsourcerer will obtain and utilize to their advantage that what the user has brought to the venture, whose form will depend on the type of activity undertaken.

2006 Howe (cited in Colombo and Klanner, 2013)

Crowdsourcing represents a new approach through which firms can involve individuals in their business process. It is defined as the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but it is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential labourers.

This paper will follow Estelles-Arolas and Gonzalez-Ladron-de-Guevara’s definition of the powerful tool that is changing the ways businesses innovate. It best exemplifies the win-win outcome of the partnership between the untapped pool of displaced talent and in-bound oriented companies.

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2.2. Crowdsourcing implementationThe use and sometimes exploitation of an undefinably large heterogeneous mass of users, also called crowdsourcees, is vital to the condition of understanding and reaching the evolutionary level of entrepreneurial value creation. Implicitly, the crowd holds the distinctive ability through their collective participation via the Internet to reach the goals that individuals or the organization could not achieve. Accessing the enormous knowledge potential of the crowd allows for more efficient and qualitative solutions compared to tackling a problem from inside the company, where resources are limited in quality and quantity. Crowdsourcing extends the concept of sole customer integration as it addresses not only customers, but any interested Internet user. Web 2.0 tools enable participants to communicate in a decentralized fashion and collaborate towards the execution of the task.

According to Felstiner (2011), the crowdsourcing industry has experienced remarkable growth, containing a pool of paid crowdsourcing labour of over one million, earning between one and two billion dollars in the last decade. Crowdsourcing vendors, meanwhile, together bring in over $500 million annually.

A successful crowdsourcing model is presented by Saxton et al. (2013) as embedding control mechanisms such as intellectual property and copyright protection measures, compensation schemes (e.g. royalties, credits, virtual money, or real money), competition schemes (e.g. bidding or voting), quality control procedures (e.g. commenting systems, peer or specialist review), and escrow systems.

Towards the completion of a crowdsourced task, participants are driven by two basic resources of motivation: they may generally take the action for intrinsic motivations such as self-developing or willingness to help, or for extrinsic motivations such as gaining reputation or monetary incentives. Participation is motivated by peer recognition, self-marketing, and potential impact on future career opportunities (Olson and Rosacker, 2013). Leimeister et al. (2009) adds the learning incentive for participants, where there is a flux of information between employees in the company and participants, and mentors in direct relationship are assisting participants by providing their knowledge on the subject. This kind of incentive is identified in idea competitions addressed to students, scholars and trainees, which receive mentorship from tutors, lecturers or teachers. The third participant in inspiration for participants is the online community itself, as its very aim is to make the pool of knowledge accessible to any of the participants. Crowdsourcers should not consider the two types of motivation isolated from each other, as a combination of the two yields the best results. Zheng et al. (2011) argues that contest autonomy, variety, and analysability were positively associated with intrinsic motivation. Tasks should preferably be highly autonomous, explicitly specified, and less complex, as well as require a variety of skills.

According to Hammon and Hippner (2012) crowdsourcing is associated most often in the literature as problem solving within the innovation process, although Bloodgood (2013) argues that value created by participants is the driving force of innovation and competitive advantage. Crowdsourcing has evolved from the open innovation model proposed by Chesbrough (2006: 1, cited in Hammon and Hippner, 2012), as the company once involved in the project will create more pervious boundaries while strengthening its innovative capabilities. Crowdsourcing is marked intensively by the outside-in process as the company broadens its base of resources by falling back on the unexploited pool of ideas, knowledge, and labour.

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Howe (2006, cited in Colombo and Klanner, 2013) examined 3 crowdsourcing models: contest, collaborative and moderated. In the contest model, individuals submit ideas and the winner is selected by the company. In the collaborative model, the crowd evolves ideas and picks the winner. In this way ideas evolve and community engagement increase; however, the model is more difficult to manage and control decreases. Finally, in the moderated model, individuals submit ideas, the crowd evolves the ideas, a panel selects the finalists, and the crowd votes on the winners.

Terwiesch and Xu (2008) draw attention to three different types of problems that can be tackled via web-based intermediaries: expertise-based (e.g. modify an existing process design to fit a new production site), ideation (e.g. design next-generation binder) and trial-and-error (e.g. a pill that reduce grey hair) problems. Literature focuses on the last, neglecting the others. Competition architecture seems to work better for solving ideation based problems, while competence searching architecture seems to be better suited to solving expertise-based problems. Expertise-based problems are characterized by low technical and market uncertainty, and present ‘low-risk with little novelty in them, such as converting a computer-aided design drawing into another format or designing a process recipe for a commonly used chemical reaction’. Ideation problems are characterized by low technical uncertainty and high market uncertainty. They are ‘broad and non-detailed innovation problems for which the seeker looks for novel ideas’, such as the creation of Lego or of an iPhone application. Trial-and-error problems are characterized by high technical uncertainty and low market uncertainty.

Also carried out under the crowdsourcing principle, the idea of crowdfunding is that of substituting a small group of investors providing relatively large amounts, with a large number of sponsors (the crowd) issuing small sums. Kickstarter.com is one of the popular platforms where projects of diverse categories are micro-financed.

Hammon and Hippner (2012) conclude that the use or exploitation of potential from a large, undefined, heterogeneous crowd is the vital source of understanding and defining the new evolutionary level in entrepreneurial value creation.

2.2.1. In higher educationThe implementation of crowdsourcing in higher education is not wide spread, even though it presents many possibilities and likewise many challenges, and the current generation of students are digital natives. It is considered that the characteristics of the Web 2.0 are challenging the predominant norms of learning in most teaching systems.

Nicolajsen (2012) and Urbano et al. (2011) argue that challenges in the environment of social learning are the current norms with regard to distribution of control and responsibilities, quality assurance, the authenticity and the stumping of the existing border between university and private life. Moreover, students’ images may be challenged if they demonstrate unknown resources or perform poorly in switching roles. Some students in their study have considered the tasks overwhelming and felt unprepared to share their work in public.

Skarzauskaite (2012) makes the argument that crowdsourcing implementation in educational activities can yield a lot of benefits not only for the university, but for the students, community and all stakeholders taking part in the project. There are a series of projects between scientific organizations and students in universities, such as NASA’s Clickworkers project of categorizing crater patterns on Mars, or the

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Screensaver Project between Oxford University and the National Foundation for Cancer Research. The University of Alabama has initiated a project where they made use of the large public to tag or transcribe materials from existing collections for their library.

2.2.2. In the healthcare sectorSwan (2012) argues that the direct and personal connection that individuals have with health makes crowdsourced health research distinct from other citizen science areas, with a much faster expansion rate. Ekins and Williams (2010) imply that "With the squeeze on budgets and cost-cutting resulting from recent worldwide economic challenges, the failure of many drugs to make it through the pipeline to the market, and the increasing costs associated with the drug development process, we are now seeing in the pharmaceutical industry a dramatic shift, perhaps belatedly, to have to accommodate similar challenges of doing more with less.”.

There is limited documented work of crowdsourcing implementation in health and medical research (Ranard et al., 2013). They also conclude in their study that utilizing crowdsourcing can improve the quality, cost, and speed of research projects while creating novel science. Moreover, health research requires high standards for data collection and processing, protections for privacy and against physical harm.

Riedl and Riedl (2013) report the social websites CaringBridge.org and PatientsLikeMe.com as organizations providing platforms where people share information about the treatment and progression of serious medical issues, keeping in touch with healthcare professionals. The gathered patients’ data is sold to researchers, where information is carefully analysed and compared, helping to better understand and revolutionize the development of more efficacious remedies, with the potential of saving lives.

2.3. Benefits Crowdsourcing platforms are generally desired for experiments as they are usually very cheap to implement, initial results are yielded in the first 24 hours, output is of good quality and companies have access to a scarce resource - diversity of workers. The advantage is that while some individuals like to come up with solutions, others feel the need to criticize, so errors are identified (Alonso, 2013).

A micro-financing from sponsoring communities for individual projects relates to crowdfunding. Paul Belleflamme et al. (2011, cited in Sørensen, 2012) points out the surplus of value in crowdfunded projects, as in most cases investors contribute more than they normally would. This gives the projects a unique selling point, where social, entrepreneurial and artistic projects are most likely to receive support.

Hagiu (2006, cited in Djelassi and Decoopman, 2013) identifies the value creation of crowdsourcing as the increased possibilities of long-term collaborations between companies and network partners, and the “open business model” challenges facing companies that welcome customer participation with external ideas, skills, knowledge and technologies.

The involvement of citizens in planning process increases the acceptance of future users, and the more citizen input is valued, the more focused and appropriate their designs will be according to user concerns (Brabham, 2009). The importance of local knowledge has been stressed by von Hippel (2005, cited in Brabham, 2009) as non-expert knowledge involvement has the power to come up with superior solutions, which are more creative and cost-effective that traditional R&D programs, thus it should not be ignored.

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On the other hand, Brody (2003, cited in Brabham, 2009) is against public participation, highlighting that high participation may cause conflict between parties and slows down the decision-making process. Surowiecki (2004, cited in Brabham, 2009) stresses on the power of wisdom of the crowd, where many times in the right context, groups are remarkably intelligent, as solutions are not averaged, but aggregated, proving that the group is smarter than the smartest people in it. Also the ability of the crowd to handle complex data should not be underestimated.

Afuah and Tucci (2012) argue that under certain circumstances, crowdsourcing transforms distant search into local search, enabling firms to enjoy the many benefits of distant search at a minimized cost. The argument can be further emancipated with the benefit that through crowdsourcing, the risk of group thinking is eliminated, by accessing multiple views. On the other hand, Lebraty and Lebraty (2013) suggest that individuals belong to networks, and thus form cascades of information since they are influenced by their groups, and it is necessary to analyse all data to find patterns that may show cascades of information are occurring.

Mladenow et al. (2014) explain that after the launch of a product, the social crowd may take the role of marketers, spreading the word to an even larger audience. The company implicitly benefits from having a large crowd acting as its sales force, as potential customers tend to believe and trust customers, in particular friends, more than a company’s official sales force. This acts as a driving force for increased brand loyalty as well as enhancement of the relationship between organizations and customers.

2.3.1. In higher education The use of crowdsourcing has the power to keep organizations in the forefront of innovation. Such projects prepare students for the challenges of the online world, but mostly enhance the communication between ranges of bodies, such as students, administration and faculty as well as other groups or institutions outside campus. Skarzauskaite (2012) is fond of the real world practical experience that crowdsourcing gives to students, where they can apply the knowledge accumulated in class and come up with creative and important solutions, learning the ins and outs of their chosen field. Moreover, students are more in tune with the community’s needs, therefore have a better chance of creating solutions. Lindblom (2011) argues that students feel more invested in, increasing the pride in their school and bringing positive PR to the university, which also saves money in the process.

Avery (2014) relates the benefits of crowdsourced peer-to-peer assessments to enhancing the delivery and assessment of broad and diverse class participation. It encourages a system of "learning by doing" where students are decision makers, rather than merely listeners, increasing their critical thinking. It fosters an educational conduit where students have the increased responsibility of managing their own learning, rather than relying on instructors. This is achieved through a communal collaborative with shared goals and values.

2.3.2. In the healthcare sector A particular case of crowdsourcing is presented by Munro (2013), where he emphasizes that workers of a crisis-affected community are the ideal workforce for complex crowdsourcing for humanitarian purpose, which is less understood than the commercial and non-time-critical tasks. The point made here is that the mission’s success was due to the largely voluntary work, showing the power of speed, cost-effectiveness and information accuracy of crowdsourcing activity. Valle et al. (2012) note that a close collaboration

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between the academia, medical care, and biobank industries, as well as across disciplinary borders, is necessary for a world-leading research in neglected diseases.

Riedl and Riedl (2013) and Ekins and Williams (2010) identify the benefits in health care of using crowdsourcing as the less costly and much faster way of carrying out studies. Scientists can develop, refine, test and retest ideas at an unprecedented rate. The increased benefits for patients are that they do not have to travel to take part in costly medical trials, and studies can involve an unlimited pool of patients from all over the world, under diverse contexts.

Crowdsourcing has a huge potential of medical R&D acceleration as it helps reduce the duplication of research efforts, facilitating increased collaboration between patients and medical experts and centralizing data. Nelson (2014) found in his study that patients are highly motivated to share detailed information about the origins and impacts of symptoms and side effects, on a level unprecedented in traditional data collection by doctors or drug companies. By including patients from the beginning, the effort could lead to better design of clinical trials.

Wheat et al. (2013) stresses on the fact that in crowdfunding, although the time spent nurturing relationships with potential contributors most of the time exceeds that of writing up a proposal for a grant application, the rewards from this bottom-up approach can be enormous. More meaningful and long lasting relationships between scientists and the public can be achieved, reaching a more diverse and broad audience than traditional funded projects.

2.4. Challenges and LimitationsAlthough there are examples out there that prove the feasibility of crowdsourcing activities, some companies are sceptic about implementing it, because of poor knowledge of the Web 2.0 environment, financial constraints and the perceived risk that it is almost impossible to calculate the return on the investment, rising anxiety (Loren, 2010, cited in Djelassi and Decoopman, 2013). Another limitation is suggested by Brabham (2009) and involves the construction of the Web interface that needs costly designing to maximize accessibility and usability (including for people with disabilities in countries where it is mandated by law), and sustaining of the online community, which issues dealing with the crowd resistance, timing, promotion through social media sites, guerrilla marketing or paid advertising and inclusion. The benefit of a well-designed platform is that it can be replicated and re-used for future crowdsourcing projects to minimize costs.

The resistance of the crowd is another concern, as it can destabilize an online community and damage the problem solving capability of the crowd. It is complicated to determine when to include or exclude individuals, and dealing with their resistance through censoring the crowd can bring negative consequences like depressing the creative input for problem solving and innovating.

Brabham et al. (2014) found that crowdsourcing has been criticized as a threat to and disregard of professional expertise and an exploitation of creative labour. Moreover, Felstiner (2011) and Hyman (2013) argue that participants do not usually earn benefits and enjoy no job security. They found that many vendors give firms the right to reject unsatisfactory work, without paying the workers and without necessarily relinquishing the right to use the work anyway. Another pressing concern in their study is that some companies use crowdsourcing to produce more authentic-feeling internet "spam" or fake product reviews. Above unethical practices, the main danger of spam tasks is that they will clog the platforms so

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completely that firms and workers searching for more legitimate work will not be able to find each other. This issue is reinforced by Dimitriu (2012), stating that in 2010, researchers from New York University estimated that 41% of all jobs offered by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk were used to generate spam, clicks on ads, or to influence the results of search engines.

Wang et al. (2013) and Naroditskiy et al. (2014) touch upon the risk of malicious attacks or "crowdturfing campaigns" on crowdsourcing projects, and define them as challenges to existing Internet security mechanisms that detect activities of automated programs such as CAPTCHAs, with the potential of drastically decreasing the performance or making the campaign easily bypassed when attacks are generated by real human workers inside the crowdsourcing system. Crowdturfing campaigns such as ZhuBaJie and SanBaHa violate acceptable user practices with highly questionable tasks such as spreading rumours via fake tweets, or creating, cloning, or maintaining false user accounts, with tasks offering payment in less than $0.25 per task.

Hutter et al. (2011) argue for the implementation of their concept of "communitition" that should include elements of competitive participation without disabling the climate for co-operation. Collaboration in communities is based on the willingness of the participants to freely reveal their knowledge and expertise and openly work together, hence access to all intellectual property rights become public. However, their study show the level of collaboration and mutual support drastically decreases when community participants become rivals, with the sole benefit of spurring community member’s interest in innovation activities. Members like to engage in self-stated tournaments, which triggers intense interactions, and a large numbers of contributions and loops of ‘trial and error’ experimentations that potentially lead to superior innovations. Looking at co-operation, it allows firms to reduce risks, costs and uncertainties associated with new product development and innovation. The pitfalls however bear some risks, such as resource-demanding establishment of the relationships, hidden costs, dependencies, as well as a high level of time and attention invested in co-ordination and control mechanisms.

Wolfson and Lease (2011) delve into the legal pitfalls that intersect with crowdsourcing activities. Taking the example of US, the Fair Labour Standards Act acts to protect employees with issues such as minimum wage or overtime regulations, which crowdsourcers must be mindful of. The act is yet unclear about who qualifies as an employee, but since crowdsourcing sites are growing in popularity and number, this will soon be regulated. It is important to note that it carries the risk of potentially raising the cost of conducting crowdwork. Another area of intersection with the law is the Patent Law, and companies should pay special attention to the increasingly complex tasks and their protection. Looking into joint inventorship, it can be very difficult to identify who deserves the inventor status, and even who participated, thus all participants need to apply for the patent together, otherwise it could be rendered unenforceable. Companies should also pay close attention when disclosing the data about their customers/users as they can face the risk of violating data security regulations. Similar to Patent law, Copyright law gives authors certain rights to protect their works from improper use. Instead of pertaining to useful inventions, however, copyright protects original creative work. Crowdsourcers may lose solitary control over creative works unless they address these issues. In light of crowdfunding campaigns, companies need to submit investment contracts under The Securities Exchange Act of 1994. Although the key question in crowdfunding is weather an offer constitutes an investment contract and thereby a security under the law. Lebraty and Lebraty (2013) argue that crowdfunding currently lies in a gray area of fiscal regulation.

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2.4.1. In higher educationUrbano et al. (2011) stresses on the fact that undergraduate students for example do not possess the appropriate expertise to handle the amount of information in a crowdsourcing task, risking to dedicate too much time to efficiency issues rather than effectiveness and the implementation and understanding of the task in hand. Urbano et al. also found in their study that students can be careless in choosing the task, and can be deeply influenced by the amount of work that colleagues provide, proving detrimental to their creative and accurate output. Instead of building a collaborative communal learning environment, Avery (2014) found in her study that students tend to focus on themselves, rather than the group’s learning trajectory.

The present use of VLEs (virtual learning environments) or CMSs (course management systems) present primarily supporting logistical processes rather than pedagogical change, and Conole et al. (2006, cited in Collis and Moonen, 2008) suggest that students perceive them as disappointing and recur to searching on other self-selected learning resources. This is still in practice because the pedagogies don’t perceive the value of crowdsourcing, they have limited digital skills and believe it is too difficult to implement. The key reasons for it are the lack of such pedagogical models, pressured by a lack of confidence and uncertainty to change, as well as the belief that innovation will only bring more work and potentially cause problems in implementation, connected with time burdens. For crowdsourcing to become mainstream in the education sector, the added value to instructional processes must be seen in terms of pedagogical approach, instructional integration and support, and assessment.

In terms of quality of assessments, since there is no pre-determined right or wrong answers, students are highly sensitive to ambiguities in grading and marking, as the more complex and open-ended the contribution, the more room for conflict. Moreover, if students feel negative about the quality of learning activities and the way their performance is assessed, this will negatively reflect on the institution. On the other hand, Avery (2014) argues that crowdsoruced peer-to-peer assessments are perceived by students as fair and accurate, decreasing social loafing and increasing team work satisfactions. Collis and Moonen (2008) touch upon another issue- intellectual property. There is a thin line for breaching the boundaries of IP and issues of plagiarism require an organization-wide policy as well as models for practice. Institutions risk being charged with the legality of learner-produced artefacts.

Anderson (2011) considers an issue that can undermine the fast development of a project, which is mentor availability. In order to offer user control, students choose between live and stored mentoring sessions. Typically in the start-up phase, the availability of willing mentors at the moment the students request assistance is fairly suspect.

2.4.2. In the healthcare sectorSwan (2012) identifies two limitations to crowdsourced health research studies- the evidence base (study design, regulation, study methods and oversight), and critiques made of the field (degree of novel findings, citizen science as a pseudo-science, and overstating of impact). Much of the information is self-reported, and the quality of output cannot be verified as not all participants meet the conditions or engagement, and they cannot be fully reliable. In terms of the study design, there are limitations in terms of unclear protocol, self-selection bias, as well as funding. Participants are most times like-minded,

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resulting a cohort that is too homogenous or heterogeneous for significant statistics. Furthermore, industry financed studies are criticized and not fully accepted, due to a lack of transparency. Cost can also be a barrier, thus funding models that don’t affect the integrity of the study results need to be established. There is a myth in crowdfunding that only charismatic projects are funded (Wheat et al., 2013). The crowd that the project engages in is far more important for the success of the project than it’s topic of research. Projects that raise millions are typically initiated by individuals or organizations that invest a lot of time and effort in building their audience.

Participants have also been criticized to lack interest in health, and their participation could be further undermined by health privacy concerns. This barrier shows that only a few individuals engage in action-taking, with the condition that the task is automated, easy, and accompanied by financial incentives.

Ekins and Williams (2010) concludes that for the companies in the "for profit" realm have as the principal motivation the revenue accumulated from a crowdsourced innovation, rather than philanthropic values or the pursuit of intellectual challenge.

2.5. Strategies to overcome the challenges and limitationsMost of the times, participants play the role of producers, innovators or problem solvers, but they are only temporarily connected to the organization for a specific task. Hutter et al. (2011) emphasises that managerial control systems have to strategically uncover and leverage the knowledge and skills of potential labourers and draw more diverse, intelligent and capable people into the platform, rather than engaging in their retention or enhancing their skills.

Allahbakhsh et al. (2013) point out that the overall outcome quality depends on the definition of the task that’s being crowdsourced and the contributing workers’ attributes, such as reputation and expertise. The task design needs to have a clear definition with a time limitation, have a friendly user interface, and assign workflows for complex tasks through chained simple subtasks. It is a given that incentives and compensation policy can greatly affect the outcome quality.

Satzger et al. (2013) suggests an auction-based crowdsourcing approach to overcome these challenges and ensure quality. They also stress the importance of having authoritative sources based on good seeds to prevent hostile workers that cheat by copying existing results from the platform, providing false information or spamming the platform with unusable task results. Eickhoff and de Vries (2013) identified in their study a significant number of workers that are producing quick, non-reflected incorrect answers in order to increase time efficiency and gain more money. This compromises on the quality of the activity and their numbers are growing. Low payment usually results in sloppy work, although more cheaters will be attracted if the reward is gradually increased, deteriorating the performance even further. The solution presented by Eickhoff and de Vries (2013) was to construct tasks in such a way that it takes approximately the same time to rightfully complete it as it is to cheat, thus managing to discourage cheaters rather than discover them. They also found that cheaters are less attracted to novel tasks that involve abstract thinking and creativity.

Wang et al. (2013) offer two strategies of overcoming malicious attacks:

Web service admins could in theory defend against crowdturfind by increasing the secrecy of the crowdsourced project and tracking all tasks to identify and remove their output. Specific details of

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the task such as content templates or target accounts should only be reviled to workers that take on a task, requiring them to associate with phone numbers or bank accounts to make jobs significantly more difficult to track and easier to detect.

The behaviour signatures of output from crowdturfing sites can be evaluated and compared against organic content, since they yet failed to fully implement privacy measures. The differences can be spotted in the workers behaviour over time, or in the content itself, as well as in the burst of content generation when tasks are first posted.

Brabham’s (2009) study considers the robustness of a Web interface design to sustain an online community, which needs to be vibrant and maximize user experience and accessibility. Costs, timing and promotion are real issues surrounding crowd resistance, and aggressive marketing and PR are needed to kick-start it. Crowdsourcing through social networking sites helps improve the relationship with customers, being used as a tool to promote proximity and make customers understand that their voices are heard. Companies that succeed in creating the “buzz”, young dynamic image of the event will easily grab the curiosity and emotional response of people not only towards the event, but the brand as well.

2.5.1. In higher educationBecause students have been sometimes confused about the task specifications, Nicolajsen (2012) suggests that a way to teach with less stress is to present a more rigid learning design in smaller steps, with less choice, more structure and rules to guide the interaction. In dealing with the competitiveness issue, a way to overcome the limitation is to assign a responding person or mentor to each discussion for guidance.

The Learning Design Website (http://www.learnigndesigns.uow.edu.au/index.html) has risen from a multi-university research project in Australia and provides templates and guidance for instructors in the design and implementation of learner-centred learning activities.

In dealing with assessment challenges, Collis and Moonen (2008:100) suggest the following strategies for mainstream Web 2.0 tools and practices:

Both instructors and students must value an educational approach where learner participation and contribution are balanced with acquisition.

A pedagogical approach must be used that reflects contribution-oriented activities where students create at least some of their own learning resources.

The approach must be scaffolded in practice by interlinked support resources for both instructors and students. Uncertainty must be reduced as much as possible for the students in terms of what is expected of them, and to what standard.

The processes as well as the products produced by the students must be assessed as part of overall course assessment practices.

2.5.2. In the healthcare sectorIn terms of legal requirements, crowdsourcing does not always conform to generally accepted industry practices of research conduct. Swan (2012) recommends institutional review board approvals, consenting processes, data use policies, and communication to potential participants. Information provided should be non-technical and easy to understand, with a clear data format. Financial liability should be introduced in group insurance policies for health collaboration communities.

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http://www.learnigndesigns.uow.edu.au/index.html

Crowdfunded platforms generally provide two models of pitching for a project: a narrative and a short video. It is vital in both approaches to outline the research as simply as possible, and employ passion and creativity. Contributors to crowdfunded projects usually expect some type of reward for their contribution, although mostly in science there are immaterial rewards such as photographs, t-shirts, or acknowledgement in public work. To have a greater impact on contributors, rewards should be based on personal connections, such as guest lectures, dinners, or hosting donors in the laboratory for one day.

2.6. Students and young professional’s perspectivesThe literature is extremely poor on the research from the perspective of the crowd, with a focus on students and young professionals. Some aspects have been touched upon in the chapter above, although the search has been made on a number of different fields on top of the higher education and healthcare without any relevant outcome, which motivated the author to gather information from own sources and test them against the general theories and perspectives of the existing literature in crowdsourcing. This will be later discussed in the following chapters.

3. METHODOLOGY The research was conducted to identify the benefits of crowdsourcing implementation and the challenges it faces, especially due to the fact that it is not yet fully understood and regulated. This paper takes two case studies in consideration, one from the healthcare industry and the other form higher education, and analyses and compares the data to identify the differences and similarities between them and the general literature. Because is it extremely under researched, it also takes the view of students and young professionals to better understand the popularity of crowdsourcing as a new business model, but also to explore the views from the perspective of potential crowd workers on the characteristics of crowdsourcing, their intention to implement it on their own in the future, and find out what industries in their view can most benefit from crowdsourcing.

This work adopts the subjectivism approach, which views reality as being socially constructed and the social actors take different interpretations according to their specific situations. Saunders et al. (2012) argues that the subjectivist’s view is something that the organisation is as a result as process of continuing social enactment. It is moderated by social interactions and physical factors. This also sets the ground of the philosophical position that has been selected. The paper follows the interpretivist approach because it emphasises the differences between humans and their role as social actors. Saunders et al. argues that the interpretivist approach is value bound and it requires entering the social world of the research subjects and understanding their world from their point of view. Because not only are business situations complex, they are also unique, and they are function of a particular set of circumstances and individuals coming together at a specific time.

The reasoning adopted in this paper is deductive, as the conclusion will be derived logically from a set of premises, the conclusion being true when all the premises are true (Saunders et al., 2012). It’s also called a ‘top-down’ approach, because the work is done from the more general information to the more specific, verifying and evaluating the existing propositions or hypothesis on the theory of crowdsourcing through the data collection. There is a search to explain causal relationships between concepts and variables. The theory testing is done through qualitative data analysis, enabling facts to be measured.

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3.1. Research designThe research design focuses on the plan of answering the research questions. Qualitative research will be conducted, because it uses non-numerical data, and it is interpretive because it needs to make sense of the subjective and socially constructed meanings expressed about the phenomenon being studied. It presents the intention to establish trust and participation in order to obtain sensitive in-depth cognitive access to data. Through the qualitative research, the participant’s meanings and the relationships between them are studied. There will be a non-standardized data collection to give room to a more interactive and naturalistic research, where questions and procedures may alter and emerge in relation to each participant’s context.

This is an exploratory study because open questions have been addressed to discover what is happening and gain insights about the topic of interest. The research was conducted to better understand the nature and practices of crowdsourcing in real life examples, through semi-structured in-depth individual interviews with crowdsourcing practitioners and potential future participants, relying on the quality of their contributions to help guide the subsequent stage of the research (Saunders et al., 2012). An exploratory study was selected for its advantage of flexibility and adaptability to change, as each specific context could change the direction of the study as a result of new data that appears and new insights that occur.

The research design has been synthesized in a reliable manner, having the data collection techniques and analytic procedures produce transparent consistent findings of external validity, even in the case of repeating them on a different occasion or by a different researcher.

3.2. Data collectionTwo holistic case studies have been developed, looking into companies from two different industries – ‘QuantuMDx’ in healthcare and ‘The UC-Crowd Project’ in higher education- to gain a rich understanding of crowdsourcing and the processes being enacted (Eisenhardt and Grabner, 2007, cited in Saunders et al., 2012). The case study strategy has been selected for its considerable ability to generate answers to the question ‘why?’ as well as ‘what?’ and ‘how?’, helping explore and understand better each context, and because of its capacity to demonstrate one or both forms of replication. The rationale for using multiple case studies focuses on whether findings can be replicated across cases. The contextual factors were chosen deliberately different, and the impact of this difference will be presented in what Yin (2003) calls theoretical replication. Although case study research can prove to be extensive and demanding, it can be a worthwhile way of exploring and even challenging existing theory, and it can also provide a source of new research questions.

The interviews carried on with the two companies were supplemented by 11 non-standardised, open-ended face-to-face and electronic interviews engaged with students and young professionals, to bring a more in-depth understanding and detailed answers of their views on crowdsourcing and their intentions for using it.

The time horizon relates to the cross-sectional studies, as the interviews were conducted over a relatively short period of time, looking into a particular phenomenon at a particular time.

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3.2.1. Ethical considerationsGaining access in companies is known to be very changing especially from an external researcher’s view, as in this case. Remaining sensitive and issuing goodwill on every level, as well as demonstrating clearly the research integrity was vital. Saunders et al. (2012) identifies a hybrid from of access the combination between traditional and internet-mediated approaches. Interviews were conducted face-to-face, as well as through the webcam using Skype and through email. The type of access in the organisations was in the form of cognitive access, which was obtained through negotiating personal entry in exchange for a final copy of the dissertation for their use.

All participants in the research have been informed that the interviews will be audio-recorded, and have been assured of their confidentiality of data and anonymity.

The following strategies had been used for gaining access in the organisations- allowed sufficient time to exchange emails with existing networks that proved to be the only form of success of gaining access through recommendation; developed access incrementally by establishing credibility through providing a clear account of the purpose of research and type of access required using suitable language through an introductory letter to the organisational gatekeepers; since crowdsourcing is still a rather new phenomenon, the information might be sensitive, so organisational concerns about granting access was conquered by assuring their confidentiality of data and anonymity of the organisation and individual participants will be safe (it is worth mentioning that confidentiality and anonymity were explicitly granted to be disclosed in writing- see Appendix 14).

Codes of ethics are intended to avoid poor practice, malpractice and harm as well as to promote ethical practice and private or public good. Management of data complies with the data protection legislation European Directive 95/46/CE (Saunders et al., 2012). Primary data is up to date and kept securely, it has not been made or altered and results are not falsified, reported fully and accurately, irrespective if they contradict expected outcomes. The same applies for secondary data. Furthermore, there is no risk of abusive content, exposure or compromising the situation for the researcher.

3.3. Data analysisAll interviews were audio recorded and transcribed using the qualitative data analysis software NVivo. After correcting transcription errors, non-verbal communication, as well as the tone have been indicating in detail. All interviews were saved in a word-processed file. In addition to the audio-recordings, a record of contextual information has been achieved through self-memos to help categorise the data and identify patterns and differences.

For this particular research, the author is going to adopt thematic coding approach in order to gain a structured and comprehensive understanding of the data gained through the interviews. The analysing process will undergo through the following steps:

Thorough reading of the interviews' transcripts. Re-reading and line-by-line analysis of the transcript following by breaking the data into different

chunks of information. Open coding: giving each chunk of data a code according to its meaning. Grouping similar codes into a smaller number of groups of codes while constantly checking back

with the original transcripts to ensure the accuracy of this process.

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Closed coding: grouping the code groups into overarching themes.

3.4. Samples In order to answer the research questions, sampling has been selected in favour of a census due to a tight deadline and a need for quicker results. The organisation of data collection is more manageable as fewer people are involved, and another benefit of sampling identified by Barnett (2002, cited in Saunders et al., 2012) is that it makes possible a higher overall accuracy.

The focus was on a small number of cases with the objective of an in-depth study. In the case of the two organisations, there has been a non-probability purposive heterogeneous sampling from the general population of crowdsourcing organisations, as the purpose was to sample for diversity and a rich spectrum of ideas. Patton (2002, cited in Saunders et al., 2012) argues that the strength of a small sample is that it may contain cases that are completely different. Table 2. represents the demographics for the selected organisations. Secondary data about QuantuMDx was obtained from companieshouse (2014), as for the UC-Crowd project, the information was retrieved from their official website UC-Crowd (2014). Both organisations are UK based. A total of 14 invitations have been sent out, out of which only 2 responses were obtained, issuing a response rate of 14.3%. A total number of 3 participants have contributed to the research from this sample.

The research totals a number of 16 participants from both samples.

Table 2.

Name of organisation UC-Crowd QuantuMDxIndustry Higher education Healthcare

Size 13 partners 40+ employeesRevenue - -

Date started 2013 2008

This was accompanied by 11 semi structured interviews conducted with students and young professional through a simple random sampling criteria. There was a total of 18 invitations sent out, with 11 responses and 2 ineligible responses. This totals a 68.7% response rate. In terms of demographics, participants in the research are between the ages 22-25, originating from countries such as Romania, India, Germany, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Spain and Bulgaria. This sample was selected to demonstrate the different perspectives of different backgrounds in crowdsourcing contexts. Table 3. shows the field of work or study for each individual participant in the research, as well as the area of interest for crowd labour in crowdsourcing projects.

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Table 3.

Field of work or study Interest in crowdsourcing projects

Interviewee 1 Public Relations Public Relations

Interviewee 2 Architectural Technologist

Design; Technical analysis; Décor; House extensions or a building from

scratchInterviewee 3 Marketing Marketing; Creative arts projects; Ads

development; Scientific research; Astronomy

Interviewee 4 Electrical Engineering Electronic systems

Interviewee 5 MSc Innovation, Creativity and

Entrepreneurship

Medical devices


Entrepreneurship

Food and beverage industry

Interviewee 7 MSc Accounting -

Interviewee 8 Game development Gaming- 3D modelling; texturing


Entrepreneurship

Marketing; Design


Entrepreneurship

Video games

Interviewee 11 Software design Software challenges- Websites; Desktop; Web-based app development; Database

management

3.5. Measurements This section intends to present the semi-standardised interviews structure for both the students and young professionals as well as for each of the two case studies. The interview questions from the two case studies differ because of the distinct circumstances of the second case study, which will be presented further in the findings chapter. The questions for QuantuMDx (see Appendix 2) were adapted from the original structure of 26 questions that have been prepared for the UC-Crowd Project (see Appendix 1).

For the case of students and young professionals, a number of 20 questions were selected to measure the views of being involved in a crowdsourcing project. See Appendix 4 for an example of the questions, selected from all the samples for its clarity and consistency.

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4. FINDINGS4.1. Case study I: The UC-Crowd Project

The UC-Crowds is a European project initiated in October 2013, with support of the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Commission. ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon is the coordinator of the 13 partners consortium across Europe which includes 7 Higher Education Institutions, 5 Companies and 1 Research Centre (Salford University Business School, 2014). The aim of the project is to link academia projects with company’s needs and business problems for the chance to create innovative solutions. The project has many ambitions - to transfer the crowdsourcing model into the academic environment, create stronger synergies between companies and Higher Education Institutions, contribute to European economic growth with more well trained human resources and create a network of partnership in the field of energy. The initiative followed the companies struggle to attract solvers and maintain active participation. The UC-Crowd aims to answer this limitation by increasing the number of students and professors using a crowdsourcing platform called ‘Challenge Academy’ and engage them in solving real life business problems. The platform is scheduled to go live in October this year.

From the interview with Dr. Aleksej Heinze from the Salford University Centre for Digital Business team, this research was able to gain insight into the implications of this project.

4.1.1. ImplementationThe UC-Crowd follows the idea of engaging more students with companies in real life business problems, based on the company’s needs, creating opportunities for a more experienced crowd of students.

" … students to get more real life experience of what it is they want to do in terms of their career and emm obviously it gives them sort of real life assignments of for example like you’re doing now dissertation, as you could pick up a real projects and just do your dissertation based on something that the company needs."

The rationale for creating their own community platform is because most crowdsourcing platforms are US based, while this is a European partnership, and furthermore there is nothing like it in the world.

"… universities are essentially feeding some other ecosystem that doesn't exist in Europe […] which again isn't in existence out there and […] it will have features that other platforms don't have.”

The crowdsourcing approach adopted is expertise based due to the nature of university assignments, and it has been opted for a moderated collaborative model, as there will be a pre-approving system for assignments from the university and supervisors, all solutions will be posted, and all students will have a chance to have a go with everything.

4.1.1.1.Control mechanisms The organisation is still keeping things rather private because there are still issues with the platform, although they have strategized against misbehaviour, malicious attacks and quality control. The main dependencies with organic content will be with ACAP (automated content access protocol), which relates to a method of providing machine-readable permissions information for content to be compliant with publishers' policies without the need for human interpretation of legal terms. They will also rely on some gatekeepers before the problems being posted, as well as a crowd self-regulated mechanism "to report

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content that is inappropriate as you would have on any other social networks", before important issues reach the platform administration.

Because of the collaborative- competitive environment and the fact that several universities can take on one problem, there will be more filtering on the platform compared to other projects.

4.1.1.2.Motivational factorsThis platform follows a different strategy than mainstream crowdsourcing practices. There will be no monetary incentives involved, as tasks will be created from the student’s needs for assignments and that of the lecturer’s needs for real life projects. The motivational factors involved include mostly the marks rewarded for successful projects and gaining experience in the field.

"so there are some other incentives apart from the fact of solving the problem being sent to risk getting an assignment mark, and obviously passing modules and getting work experience."

4.1.1.3.Task designTasks on the platform will not be highly specified, but rather "fuzzy in many ways" because of the nature of students, and the intention to allow creative freedom in interpretation. The complexity of tasks for students will have to be challenging enough to be accepted by the higher education regime. As Dr. Heinze describes:

"… it will have to be here is the problem for example I have always supply of this product and emm I'm not sure how this product could be sold in another country for example. And then students from another country could virtually do market research and write feasibility study within all sorts of different modules, and see if it works and then provide some solutions for that."

4.1.2. Benefits There are three key stakeholders that are benefiting from the platform- students, academics as well as companies. The key benefit for students identified in the research is the potential of being employed by the issuing company if their solution is valuable, although regardless of the success of the projects they can be awarded with a good mark for their dissertation/ assignment for participating in crowdsourcing, as it will not be compulsory for them. Furthermore their assignments will be more interesting and relevant for their future career path as they take on real life case studies, meeting industry needs.

“… there is an opportunity for you to actually get stuck into one of the real problems, and ultimately it is CV building as well as employability for students. "

From the companies’ perspective, there are countless benefits coming from the platform as an extent of technological resource, and having an "increased reach and […] opportunity to get a wider sort of audience and pool of answers to problems that they might be facing.".

Another important valuable asset is that of not having to worry about labour laws, as “students will be working on assessed university work, so that's really different. It's not contract based. ". This eliminates the common belief that crowdsourcing is a threat to the current job market, as “We are trying to use it as a work experience for current students.”.

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4.1.2.1.Value creationAs a partnership currently at European level, the platform once extended will have the benefit of disseminating opportunities and create value all around the world. There will be an intention from the companies to abstract commercial value from the student assignments, but the real value remains in their ideas.

"There will definitely be the intention to create commercial value to the companies, because ultimately they wouldn't want to be just putting in stuff for the sake of giving some student assignment, but ultimately they're in it to get emm ideas that they could use for their business."

4.1.3. Challenges The main barriers identified were persuading the academics to engage with the platform, convincing companies to engage, and ultimately making sure the platform meets their needs. This is the reason for putting in place a huge European network to spread awareness. The other limitation is that crowdsourcing is an emerging concept especially in the academic environment, and since it risks to be seen as a bad source of reference in favour of really good outcome, the battle will be to change people’s perspectives. Moreover, the platform is still in the testing period, so many judgements of future outcomes can only be guessed.

4.1.3.1.TransparencyWhen asked about the benefits of becoming more transparent after full adoption of crowdsourcing, there has been a hesitation, augmented by:

"for universities it is always, you know ... a challenge to see why the problem has been chosen or not emm ultimately there is some potential for more transparency than it is now, but you know I can still see that it is still relying on people to involve itself with certain problems"

4.1.3.2.Intellectual propertyThis has been marked as a major problem, as companies seeking financial benefit will not have the copyright to solutions given by students, as they will be returned to their issuers. The solutions content will be posted and made available for everyone to acknowledge and lied under creative commands attributes.

"we are emphasising that problems are not mission critical, so whatever problems that are being submitted or the challenges that they call should not be something that will be considered as emm you know, commercially sensitive. And ultimately, all the students of co-worked at taking part in this problems will have the opportunity to make all the content available, so all the solutions will be acknowledged and we hope that will be a use under the creative commands attribution lies"

4.2. Case study II: QuantuMDxThe QuantuMDx Group is a biotech organisation based in Newcastle upon Tyne’s genetics hub, the International Centre for Life. Its vision is developing quality molecular diagnostics accessible to all humans around the world, which is not expensive, too complex and time consuming (QuantuMDx, 2014). The interview with the CEO Elaine Warburton and Marketing Executive Maggie Love, provides a closer look into their mission of developing the world’s first handheld medical device ‘Q-POC’ that addresses

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health challenges such as malaria, TB, HIV or cancer, and their experience with crowdsourcing as well as crowdfunding.

4.2.1. ImplementationQuantuMDx has focused on a 6 to 9 months crowdfunding campaign to support its handheld medical device. Since the company’s main objectives have been to raise capital without giving equity away, and raising awareness, it chose the Indiegogo platform because it had a matching humanitarian focus as well.

"we found a website called Indiegogo. We felt that that was a very good fit for a company like ours. It had devices as projects but it also had a humanitarian flair as well and we are very much humanitarian focused." (CEO Elaine Warburton)

They followed to bring the technology to the people especially from developing countries, so they worked on an assay to bring people to support their project with small donations, researching successful projects and consulting with Indiegogo about procedures to develop a successful project. The rationale for choosing malaria was "a huge unmet need about offering very rapid diagnostics for drug resistance patients to people out in resource scarce settings to enable them to be given the right drugs to basically cure their malaria" (CEO Elaine Warburton). It was malaria and clinical trials that they asked initially for funding.

Their crowdsourcing idea has been about engaging the public to provide design ideas and a new name for the device. They followed a contest model of crowdsourcing, as "Anyone who contributed any amount of money, whether it's just a dollar or a hundred dollars or whatever, anyone who contributed in the campaign, could contribute with an idea for the name of the design." (Marketing Executive Maggie Love).

4.2.1.1.Funding optionsThe alternatives over the years for funding that QuantuMDx has accessed relates to raising non-equity diluting funds, grants from the Technology Strategy Board, European Union, and South African, leveraged by equity funding from angel investors, high-network individuals and philanthropists.

It was when looking for alternative ways of raising funds that they discovered Kickstarter idea crowdfunding platform that could also advertise medical devices.

4.2.1.2.Control mechanisms Making sure the device was fortified and secured has been challenging. They had to adopt the stringent Foof and Drug Administration standards. Furthermore, the flow of data had to be encrypted to make sure no one can reach the information.

"We will be potentially uploading and downloading individual data from the device into a hospital database or a pathology database or something like that, we have to be very secure. Very secure on making sure there's no leakage, making sure that someone can't get hold of data so we’re making sure it’s all encrypted." (CEO Elaine Warburton)

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4.2.1.3.Motivational factorsTo try and attract participants, there has been an extensive use of social media, with 6 months of building their network, with teaser campaigns on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. They also attended digital conferences such as CES or Wired.

4.2.1.4.Feedback Concerning their crowdsourcing campaign, QuantuMDx’s feedback from participants was that they were more interested in the concept of the device and spreading the word, rather than designing it themselves, explicitly asking for functionalities or renaming it.

"So the feedback that we actually got was more marketing and more evangelical, than of here's the design […] it should have this device functionality" (CEO Elaine Warburton)

On the other hand, even though the campaign is over, the company managed to engage with the crowd as they continuously receive feedback on their thoughts, asking for updates, how they can help or whether they need new or different tests.

4.2.2. BenefitsBy engaging with the crowd for funding of their medical device, they managed to create a network of stakeholders of philanthropists and high-network individuals that allowed them the flexibility to continue their humanitarian vision and deliver molecular diagnostics for everyone at a very low cost, highly accurate, portable and very easy to use. They managed to seize a global interest that completely surprised them, as their message for what they were delivering went viral.

"I mean to get so much international interest from all over the world, I mean literally all over the world. It went viral. It was awesome." (CEO Elaine Warburton)

Engaging in crowdfunding has been seen as high risk in the beginning, because the company had not delivered the device as a perk like all others, it had used other perks. They tried something new and they benefited from what they termed "the best public relations campaign which was done with a tiny bit of money” (CEO Elaine Warburton). The other perceived advantage has been the accelerated paste of innovation from engaging in crowdfunding as they received interest from a lot of very good specialists on the technical side as well, managing to reduce a whole lab into a credit card size cartridge. They received a lot of interest from potential investors as well as institutions, and had a lot of scientists and journalists approach them. Having collaborated with Indiegogo has helped them raise their profile from amplifying their audience and to introduce this kind of technology into mainstream medicine, as there was nothing like it on the market. They found out that people feel safer to give their money to a platform that they’re already familiar with. They ended up with a couple hundred contributors.

Looking into the splash that QuantuMDx has been told it would have on the Indiegogo platform, when they appeared on the front page there was no real increase in audience, although when they appeared on the social media platform Facebook, they received a strong backup from the crowd.

"when we got mentioned in one particular Facebook group which had nothing to do with Indiegogo, just a technology group, we got mentioned by them, and our funding increased by 50 per cent in a matter of hours" (Marketing Executive Maggie Love)

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4.2.2.1.TransparencyFollowing their campaign, the company became more transparent and their perceived benefit was that the crowd became more implicated as stakeholders. They state that "by engaging with end users very very early on, they’re helping us to direct the look, the feel, the functionality, you know, how big it should be, how portable it should be, should it have a docking station, should it have connectivity, should it have this that and the other" (CEO Elaine Warburton). This ultimately is a win-win situation, as the product reaches the market completely regulated, meeting both the needs of customers, as well as fit into traditional clinical practice.

4.2.3. Challenges First of all QuantuMDx has been developing a disruptive innovation, and when they were searching for funding, they felt that venture capitalists would not understand their business model and humanitarian vision, as they are only interested in quick profits. Since there is no money flowing around and institutions are pushing their goals higher, "you have to develop a device even further into your development pathway than usual, and so you have to be quite nimble in finding these unusual sources of funding like crowdfunding." (CEO Elaine Warburton). This made them turn to the Indiegogo platforn, where they had to find different perks for their medical device, as they consider it is not ethically right to put a medical device in someone’s hands.

Their crowdsourcing campaign for the design of the device has not been a successful one. They had limited knowledge and research done on the subject of crowdsourcing, while the platform chosen did not deal with this aspect. Their focus has been on product launching rather than "crowdsourcing of information" (Marketing Executive Maggie Love), and it has been identified that the reason for it was that it has not been pitched right to the audience, as their message has been killed by the excitement for the device and its functionalities.

"That may have been too buried in the campaign, cuz people saw malaria, they saw a device, they wanted to know more about the device and how it was going to help millions of people especially the half a million children that die each year from malaria. Maybe they just weren’t interested in the design and name" (CEO Elaine Warburton).

4.2.3.1.Intellectual propertyIntellectual property safekeeping has been issued as very important in the process. The organisation has secured it since 2008 when they launched through high profile biotech IP attorneys. They had to be careful because if "someone came up with a design, that is their intellectual property, and then we'll work something through, but actually that didn’t quite happened” (CEO Elaine Warburton).

4.3. Students and young professionals’ perspective It should be highlighted that none of the participants in the research from this section had any previous experience in a crowdsourcing project. Their awareness of crowdsourcing practices was on the other hand vast, exemplified by most significant answers such as Apple, P&G, YahooAnswers, Wikipedia, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, as well as less globally popular platforms such as a game called ‘Unreal Tournament’, an Indian movie called ‘Lucia’, as well as a crowdfunded Spanish political party called ‘Podremus’.

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4.3.1. Motivational factorsMany answers came in the direction of being more interested in taking part in a crowdsourcing project for the opportunity to create value and have a voice in the company, and less for the financial benefits associated with crowd labour. Moreover, all participants stated they would volunteer to work pro-bono on projects with causes they support or that are humanitarian focused. There is a general pursuit for personal satisfaction and taking part in meaningful projects.

"I would love to have the chance to be part of something meaningful and interesting as long as it doesn’t confront my priorities" (Interview 11)

"I would work a pro-bono project per month, because in the end it’s about making the world a better place" (Interview 2)

"…money is not the main incentive" (Interview 8)

Except two answers, all participants were more interested in working part-time in such projects. There was also a concern for the job security of such practices, balanced by the perspective that through crowdsourcing they would "feed the personal joy and drop designated boundaries" (Interview 2).

This research highlights two motivational factors that stand out. Participants consider taking part in crowdsourcing as an opportunity of enhancing their CV’s, and they follow to get better in their filed mostly through the expertise acquired from taking place in crowdsourcing contests, seeing it as a learning cycle.

"…it's something new which I can learn in the long-run" (Interview 6)

"…if there is something that I can learn off of it, or I can find out skills that I didn't know about" (Interview 1)

4.3.2. Quality controlIn terms of quality control, judging from the majority of answers, the crowd would self-regulate and generally correct the mistakes, even when extrinsic motivation such as monetary rewards are less than desired, following these principles:

"I am used to clients changing their minds all the time, so I would do my best to correct it since you only get paid if the client is satisfied" (Interview 11)

"Self-improvement is very important to me" (Interview 3)

Furthermore, there has been a balanced perspective on taking a task in which the participants are not fully confident in their skills, with judgements such as:

"I would only get into something I'm good at" (Interview 1)

"Yes to increase my confidence and experience. If I have time I can fix it through research" (Interview 2)

"Depends if u get paid, there is expectations. If its volunteering, then I'd like to improve my skills" (Interview 8)

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4.3.2.1.Malicious attacksThe entire sample of interviews has produced the same initiative, to report any calling for or observable malicious attack against the company issuing the project. Their views on it were:

"…can’t stand unfair practice" (Interview 3)

"A legal action against that competitive company seems as the most reasonable answer to me." (Interview 11)

4.3.2.2.MisbehaviourIn this section, there have been conflicting arguments for reporting misbehaviour. The perspectives revolved around "It is a competition, so everyone should play fair under the same rules" (Interview 2), where most of the participants agreed they would first approach the misbehaving users before reporting it on the platform. On the other hand, one participant stated “…it’s not my job to monitor" (Interview 3).

4.3.3. CrowdfundingThis research determined that all participants would be willing to support a project financially, dependable on their interest in the project. One answer in particular stood out when making the observation that "… it always feels a bit unsafe" (Interview 8). And another participant has challenged crowdfunding stating that "I would rather volunteer than give them my money" (Interview 7).

4.3.4. Collaborative-competitive environmentThe views on whether the characteristic of crowdsourcing practices of collaboration between participants while there is a competition for the same prize, answers came in the form of "…teamwork is always good because there is room for debate" (Interview 2), "Competition is good because it forces you to think out of the box" (Interview 6), although the participant from Interview 3 has made the remark that "…competing for a price is detrimental, because I will probably try to hold back on knowledge to win".

5. DISSCUSSIONS In this section, the author will engage in exploring how theory links into practice both from the two companies and students and young professional’s perspective, and how the findings can add value to the existing literature. The two companies’ practices are completely different and thus cannot be compared.

5.1. Case study I: The UC-Crowd ProjectThe findings for UC-Crowd confirm most practices and norms of crowdsourcing implementation in higher education. There is a clear reason for implementing their own community and not adopting a 3rd party approach since they are trying to create something new. Looking into the approach that the platform adopts, the expertise-based problems as Terwiesch and Xu (2008) argues, are characterized by low technical and market uncertainty. Although they are low-risk, they present on the other hand little novelty. But since they will have a collaborative model, the students will be able to build on each other’s knowledge and provide the ultimate solution. Colombo and Klanner (2013) specify that although this model increases the engagement of the community, it makes it more difficult to control. The learning cycle is evidenced by their collaboration with companies for real life projects, and the flow of information will be as Leimeister et al. (2009) suggests, assisted and moderated by tutors, supervisors, mentors.

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The partnership is a strong supporter of the "learning by doing" conduit and through the use of crowdsourcing, it will create an environment where the roles between students and lecturers are switched, and as Avery (2014) related about peer-to-peer assessments, this will deliver students that are co-creators of their learning system presents the increased benefit of fostering critical thinking in them. Their local knowledge will give them the opportunity to engage in projects out of their field of expertise, and just by giving it a shot with a creative input, they might come with superior solutions than experts in the field. The value created by students has the potential to be the driving force for innovation and competitive advantage.

The control mechanisms presented in findings add to the existing literature the ACAP processes for data control, and the self-regulating mechanisms for content report seem like a good way to manage the input and output of students, as everything will be moderated by supervisors and the universities on top. Lebraty and Lebraty (2013) focus on an issue that particularly applies to students. Although crowdsourcing eliminated the risk of group thinking by accessing multiple views, individuals belong to networks and there will always be influence from peers among students, pushing the need for more filtering of content.

Motivational factors remove general practices of incentivising in crowdsourcing, since the nature of the environment is academic, and the intrinsic motivations of students rely on receiving a good mark, creating value and maybe target a future job. The tasks designed for them will be sensible to ambiguity and marking, and students in Nicolajsen’s (2012) study have been overwhelmed with the complexity, feeling unprepared to switch roles with their lecturers and share their work in public. Perhaps too much freedom for interpretation will create more room for conflict. Furthermore, the freedom for students of engaging in crowdsourcing, having interesting real life problems to face and opportunities to enhance their CV’s can only bring what Lindblom (2011) suggested- they will feel more invested in, increasing the pride in their school and bringing positive PR to the university. Again because of the academic nature of crowdsourcing, there is no need for compliance to labour laws presented in Wolfson and Lease (2011), such as minimum wage or overtime regulations.

The challenge that the UC-Crowd faces with persuading more academics to engage with the platform might be linked to Anderson’s (2011) argument that pedagogies do not perceive the value of crowdsourcing on a large enough scale, meeting barriers such as limited digital skills, an uncertainty for change and a belief that crowdsourcing is difficult to implement and innovation creates more problems that relate to time burdens.

Finally, since the problems are not commercially sensitive, the organisation does not face stringent intellectual property issues. Although as Collis and Moonen (2008) suggest, there should be an organisation-wide policy as well as models for practice for breaching the boundaries of intellectual property and dealing with issues of plagiarism.

5.2. Case study II: QuantuMDx Wheat et al. (2013) argued that crowdfunding is at the forefront of science, although it is not widely implemented because many projects fail in meeting goals or meaningfully connect with the crowd. QuantuMDx has nurtured its relationship with the crowd for 9 consecutive months, far overcoming the time to write up a proposal for a grant application, although the reward for this bottom-up approach has

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proved its worth, reaching a more diverse and broad audience than traditional funded projects. It proved Wheat et al.’s proposition that successful projects are the ones initiated by companies that invest a lot of time in building their audience.

According to Terwiesch and Xu (2008), the contest architecture works the best for solving ideation based problems, although their crowdsourcing campaign was a failure due to a number of reasons. The literature provides clues that contributors to crowdfunded projects usually expect some type of reward, even though in science they are mostly immaterial, the ones that have greater impact are based on personal connections such as hosting donors in the laboratory for one day, or some type of acknowledgement in public work. It can only be assumed that their incentive for the chance to contribute with a name for their design proved merely an insufficient practice.

The innovative project that the company initiated had to undergo distinct perks with their campaign than mainstream practices. The findings add to the literature the need for adopting to standards of Food and Drug Administration as a control mechanism for quality. Furthermore, Ranard et al. (2013) argues that health research requires high standards for data collection and processing, protections for privacy and against physical harm. QuantuMDx subjected to the norms by encrypting all its transfer of data between the database and the devices.

The organisation managed to create the ‘buzz’ described by Brabham (2009) through aggressive marketing and PR and capture the curiosity and emotional response of the crowd much faster from engaging with social media networks. As presented in the findings chapter, they managed to increase their funding by 50 per cent when a science group on Facebook mentioned them. QuantuMDx has experienced what Mladenow et al. (2014) has identified as the role of marketers that the social crowd undertakes, spreading the word to an even greater audience. The organisation benefited from a large crowd acting as its sales force, with increased trust compared to their official sales force. The evangelical nature of the movement created was driven by the humanitarian purpose and what Munro (2013) identifies as the ideal workforce in complex crowdsourcing. Moreover, industry financed studies are criticized and not fully accepted due to a lack of transparency, although the company engaged with the crowd very early on and enhanced their relationship, helping them regulate the functionalities of the device before reaching the market. QuantuMDx has enjoyed a period which Nelson (2014) describe as unprecedented in traditional data collection, as patients are highly motivated to share information about the origins and impact of symptoms and side effects.

Swan (2012) argues that the direct and personal connection that individuals have with health makes crowdsourced health research distinct from other science areas, with a much faster expansion rate. This and their humanitarian focus helped them receive interest from so many philanthropists and high network individuals, giving them the flexibility in achieving their vision. Sørensen (2012) specifically draws attention on the fact that in crowdfunded projects, in most cases investors contribute more than they would normally would, giving a unique selling point to the project. It has also been an incentive to secure long-term relationships.

Concerning their crowdsourcing contest and the fact that their respondents had not been eagerly involved in the ideation process can be linked to literature through the fact that participants have been criticized to lack interest in health, with the perceived barrier that only a few individuals engage in action-taking if the task is automated, easy, and accompanied by financial incentives. QuantuMDx had not met any of these

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specifications, but they had a successful crowdfunding campaign on the other side, which was their initial focus for their product launch. Ekins and Williams (2010) stress on the common barrier as the company’s CEO Elaine Warburton, that there is a squeeze on budgets from recent worldwide economic challenges, and companies have to learn to do more with less, finding diverse and unusual sources of funding, such as crowdfundig.

5.3. Students and young professional’s perspectivesSince there is a gap in literature on the views of the crowd with a focus on students and young professionals, the author will engage in linking the findings to commonalities in the general crowdsourcing practices.

In terms of motivational factors, participants in the research have doubted the security of a crowdsourced job and proved knowledge of the fact that solution has to be optimal to receive monetary rewards for their work. Felstiner (2011) argued that there is not much job security, nor do participants earn benefits, as firms have the right to reject the unsatisfactory work, without paying the workers ad without necessarily relinquishing the right to use the work anyway.

Brabham et al. (2014) suggested that crowdsourcing has been criticized as a threat to and disregard of professional expertise and exploitation of creative labour, although when asked about the quality level of output despite lower payment, participants in this research had not complained, making it clear that once they chose a project, it’s the value of their work that they are after, with the ultimate goal of making the world a better place. Allahbakhsh et al. (2013) the overall outcome quality depends on the definition of the task and worker’s attributes such as reputation and expertise, as well as a compensation policy. When students and young professionals were asked to if they would participate in a project where they are not confident in their skills, most responded they would try their hand. And it has been exemplified in the literature how non-expert out of the box thinking can create a better solution than boundary expertise.

The crowd proved to not take monetary incentives seriously in crowdsourcing projects, and give answers to the best of their knowledge even when benefits are not as expected. Although Eickhoff and de Vries (2013) identified that a significant no of workers are producing quick, non-reflected incorrect answers in order to increase time efficiency and gain more money. This compromises on quality and low payment usually results in sloppy work.

The issue of malicious attacks evidenced by Naroditskiy et al. (2014) has been in the direction of violating acceptable user practices, reducing the performance of the project and potentially make the campaign easily bypassed if attacks come from inside the community. The majority of respondents declared opposition to such practice, with an incentive of legal action against it. The action against misbehaviour as well proves the self-regulating authority of a community that shares the vision of the project success.

Ultimately considering the general practice of crowdsourcing implies a collaborative-competitive environment, the participant’s views have been both for and against, reasoning the out of the box thinking implied by competition, the strength of teamwork, but also holding back on information, thus the organic development of a project. Hutter et al. (2011) suggest the level of collaboration and mutual support drastically decreases when community participants become rivals, with the sole benefit of spurring community member’s interest in innovation activities.

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6. CONCLUSION Crowdsourcing has been used most frequently to deal with ideation of design, a feedback loop between companies and users, and foremost a tool to gather rich data from an unlimited source. Companies that take this initiative are not only innovative and potential pioneers, but rather concerned with the common wealth of flux of data and the establishment of a stronger bond with their stakeholders. The higher education can benefit enormously from this practice, with the potential to radically change its ground structure, and inverse the roles of students, teaching them how to teach themselves and their classmates, and engage into real life business problems where they can solve them with a spark of creativity and apply knowledge from one side to the other. Tasks and legal regulations go outside mainstream norms due to the nature of the academic environment, and relying on the value of the student’s output can be the grounds for competitive advantage.

The future looks bright for the healthcare industry as well. Because of the tough economic environment and limited funding options that can blur or prevent success of projects with a humanitarian focus, the crowd is more accessible and undoubtedly better prepared to help fund and address the development towards the company’s visions. Social media networks prove to be highly valuable in extending audience and capturing interest. The challenges faced are that there are stringent legal regulations for protection of data content, but visions can be attained through engaging with the crowd from early stages of product development and there are many opportunities to attract not only expertise, but good PR as well.

Analysing the perspectives of students and young professionals, the crowd has a natural instinct of self-regulating and removing unfair practice from the online community. Individuals are not necessarily chasing monetary incentives, but rather are interested in creating something of meaning and see crowdsourcing as an opportunity to perfect their skills, learn new things and enhance their CVs. There is a willingness to crowdfund projects that share their beliefs and also the ones that are humanitarian focused have a greater chance of catching their eye.

Anon (2013) argues that "what makes crowdsourcing so potent is its democratic nature and the fact it does not become bogged down in politics, petty bureaucracy and cross-border complications".

7. LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH There are a number of limitations linked to this research, which should be treated in the light of future research. One of them is that both companies that participated in the research have no prior experience in the field of crowdsourcing, in the process of developing incremental steps towards its adoption. Their cooperation was vital for expanding the knowledge about strategies that are adopted in the two fields of expertise. But the sampling population was very limited considering the time constrain in which the research was developed, with the observed benefit of demonstrating a modality of gaining more in-depth sensible information through a small number of interviews, than from a large number of surveys. Future research would be preferable to consider cases in which a broad crowdsourcing experience in the fields of higher education and healthcare is existent, but also explore other fields as this subject is still rather new and under researched. Furthermore, the grounds of a successful crowdsourcing contest design are still unclear and there are not many scholars which looked into this matter.

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Looking at the data from the second part of the research, concerning the views of students and young professionals, none of the participants had been involved in a crowdsourcing project, thus their interpretations of the questions have been merely hypothetical, as in real practice action might not necessarily be the same. In some cases there was a misunderstanding in communication because of the language barrier and limited awareness of the subject, where the feeling of an honest response had not been felt. Future research should focus on illustrating the opinions of experienced freelancers or crowd labourers, to understanding how crowdsourcing is viewed from the other side of the fence, the one of customers and users. Students that have been involved in higher educational crowdsourcing should be evaluated to perfect the education system and challenge the current practices.

8. Reference list

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9. APPENDICESAppendix 1. Interview Aleksej Heinze, UC-Crowd Project

Can you tell me a little bit about the UC Crowd project?

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Essentially the idea is very simple. So we want to engage more students and companies on real life business projects, which allows us both companies to get more sort of ideas from the universities, as well as students to get more real life experience of what it is they want to do in terms of their career and emm obviously it gives them sort of real life assignments of for example like you’re doing now dissertation, as you could pick up a real projects and just do your dissertation based on something that the company needs. And the good thing is that you get feedback from obviously the company and there is potential for you to get the job if your idea is very good, for example if the company are very keen and emm ultimately regardless weather the success or failure of the project you can still get a good mark for your dissertation or the assignment that you might be doing for your module.

Very nice! So what are your expectations about the outcome? Helping the students basically, is this why the partnership took place?

Emm the expectations are multiple. They're three key stakeholders, the students, academics and obviously the companies that might benefit from this and the other thing is that it is going to be a global, so ultimately the first partnership is based on companies that are around Europe but there's nothing to stop this emm project to be even more wider reaching so we hope that we'll have sort of very good emm yea dissimulation opportunity as far as emm you know creating value to the world.

Aright so you're planning to extend basically the partnership between maybe other universities and companies!

Yeah! It's gonna be open to the world so ultimately it's a be to test at the moment, so we want to try on, see how it works for us and we'll invite people to join in.

Nice, I think it's an extraordinary project! Very well, emm was the decision to initiate the project based centrally on cutting down the labour cost or creating the added value for the project or services?

Emm I think the decision is on a number of levels related to the need of students to be emm… or for universities to be more focused on what the industry needs and for students assignment to be bit more interesting and relevant to what they would be doing once they graduate, so for example you are doing a business course and you want to know what are the real business problems that companies are facing. And here is an opportunity for you to actually get stuck into one of the real problems, and ultimately it is CV building as well as employability for students.

Aright emm would you consider it a faster process of development or innovation that is more easily managed compared to hiring the full time dedicated professional or the entire research and development team?

Emm we can't really make the judgement in that yet because at the current process is still quite elaborate because we still need to ... we are not at the stage of full adoption certainly and the earlier stage is it is still quite emm complicated to beneath disseminate the project are there is and make sure that everybody is aware of it so there are quite global phase that need to do but ultimately in theory it should be emm much quicker because you have unlimited resource in terms of number of people that are responding to your program.

Exactly ... aright emm will you allow the project to rise organically or you know, will you have intensive control mechanisms?

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Eee in the first instance we are testing it so we will want to keep obviously things a bit more private because there are still some issues with the platform, but ultimately we hope to be wider reaching and dependent on the acap on the resource hopefully to be organic enriched as well and yeah.

But basically you're trying to look at the other platforms and take it as an example for the control mechanisms.

Emm we already have a platform so it's ultimately just developing the mechanisms that work for all the different international stakeholders and companies involved so yeah. So we are testing now.

Aright ... emm do you consider the corporate culture will change after, will become more transparent or more open after the crowdsourcing project?

Aaa I don't think so ...

You don't think so? Aright, emm ... so you don't see any benefits in becoming more transparent as an institution.

For... You mean for university Yes or companies to be involved in that? Well, for universities it is always, you know ... a challenge to see why is the problem is been chosen or not emm ultimately there is some potential for more transparency than it is now, but you know I can still see that it is still relying on people to involve itself with certain problem and yeah. If compared to where we are now it will be more transparent yeah.

Aright emm ... Many tools do not provide information on participants, which raises the concern of the accuracy of the output and the possibility that the process might be vulnerable to the malicious attacks from any competitors, or badly intended users of course. Emm how do you intend to overcome this limitation?

Well we emm agreed to have some gatekeepers before a problem is published and emm ultimately the crowds will self-release the problems so there will be a mechanism for people to report content that is inappropriate as you would have on any other social networks, and obviously once there are sort of flags being raised, the problems will be investigated so there will be an administrative emm role involved in the project that will hopefully be able to make it a smooth transition. But ultimately we will see how are things and how harmful it is. Emm it is still work in progress.

Aright, of course. Can you explain if there is any threat to the loss of intellectual property?

Yes this is why we are trying to make sure that the problems are not emm… we are emphasising that problems are not mission critical, so whatever problems that are being submitted or the challenges that they call should not be something that will be considered as emm you know, commercially sensitive. And ultimately, all the students of co-worked at taking part in this problems will have the opportunity to make all the content available, so all the solutions will be acknowledged and we hope that will be a use under the creative commands attribution lies in to make sure that the people are happy to say well this is the problem that was created by such and such person, and this is the person who solved this problem. So I think we will go down the creative commands attribution to emm attribute the copyright or have to make copyright problems.

Aright, so it's basically covered, one way or another there isn’t...

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Well copyright is going to be a major problem, so ultimately the copyright will be passed on once you are solving a problem, you are giving away the solution, so emm a business isn't within their right to use the problem or for their, you know, financial benefit.

Right. Emm a large fraction of projects failed due to the lack of a contract between workers and you know, failing to engage them, or motivate them. Do you have a different approach to deal with this?

Yes, because we have a students who needs assignments, and we have students who will… or lecturers who need real life projects, so that for every assignment that you set emm we've tried to make things the more real like emm in this key is in different aspect to the idea that the workers are almost composed to find a problem based on that project emm on at platform, so there is some other incentives apart from the fact of solving the problem being sent to risk getting an assignment mark, and obviously passing modules and getting work experience.

So it's actually going to be part of the modules of students? Taking part in the crowdsourcing project will be emm mandatory? Or ... just a choice?

Emm I don't know if how well if it's ... for example yeah you have a resit in emm Newcastle or in ... Yes ... So whenever you have to choose your dissertation topic, were did you go to choose the topic for example?

Emm to my supervisor.

Ok, in this case you would go to the crowdsourcing platform and say you know, what are the real problems that people are facing and your supervisor might do the same and if your supervisor is happy for you to challenge or what, to pick up a problem, and you would do that. Cuz ultimately you know, supervisors have solutions that emm you know, even for a supervisors it's useful to see what the actuals problems are for businesses.

Of course. Aright ...

So, the answer is it will not be compulsory for them to use it, but emm there a number of modules that we have in our institution and people have around the world that would always benefit from real life case study.

Do you consider any task above simple to be risky for crowdsourcing? And why?

A task is simple?

Yeah, basically generally the tasks on crowdsourcing platforms are simple, like emm you know, translating text, or you know, small tasks for coding programs ...

Emm no, we agreed towards sort of university students audience, so we're trying to make it challenging enough for that so you know, if you want to do dissertation, you can't have a dissertation that has emm translate this book. It will have to be here is the problem for example I have always supply of this product and emm I'm not sure how this product could be sold for you know, in another country for example. And then students from another country could virtually do market research and write feasibility study within all sorts of different modules, and see if it works and then provide some solutions for that. So yes, the challenges will have to be not as banal, otherwise they will not accepted obviously.

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I see. Emm are you trying to get proximity to customers or improve the market access to ... for your project?

Proximity customers as in the... who would you see as customers?

Customers being emm maybe the partner firms that are working with the university, or... any output of the students that they might have in the project.

Well personally I say that the main beneficiaries are students, who want will be doing the tasks because there will actually having the opportunity to do something that is real, so the ... from that point of view you could see students as customers, so there will be benefits from them. Emm there companies that we are working with, so there is an increased if anything for the current customers that we are working with there will be emm increased reach and you have an opportunity to get a wider sort of audience and why the pool of answers to problems that they might be facing.

But is there any ...

Yes, you increase the proximity with customers in multiple ways, yeah.

But is there any commercial value output out of the work of the students’ maybe?

Well it will depend on project by project basis. There will definitely be the intention to create commercial value to the companies, because ultimately they wouldn't want to be just putting in stuff for the sake of giving some student assignment, but ultimately they're in it to get emm ideas that they could use for their business.

Perfect. Emm is crowdsourcing making a better use of the ever increasing pool of displaced talent in your perspective? Or is it a threat to the full time job market?

Well, the way that we are perceiving it it's neither nor the other. We are trying to use it as a work experience for current student. So I don't think it's a thereat for the current job market, and what was the first question?

Emm is it making a better use of the ever increasing pool of displaced talent?Ok ... hope it will be making use of the pool of ... displaced talent you mean that people who don't emm underemployed you mean, or ...

Yes, the ... maybe even people that have emm generally they have hobbies and are not putting them in use basically.

Yeah, ok well our platform will be exclusively used by universities so ... as opposed to institutions, and the ideas is that there will be students who will be doing this part of their emm some king of assessed course for example. I don't think that will be the case here either, but ultimately generally speaking there might be that issue. Because if people have a hobby they will be contributing to some other projects yea.

Very well. Is crowdsourcing opening access to complementary technological resources and increasing the company's `absorptive capacity? Is there anything related to that in your future project?Sorry could you just repeat that question?

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Of course. Emm is crowdsourcing opening access to complementary technological resources and increasing the company's absorptive capacity?

Cracking ell, now that's a question. So, yes it is opening up technological resources because I suppose the platform is to set an extent of technological resource … in terms of the technological capacity, I don't know.

The absorptive capacity of the company.

So you are suggesting that they will be able to integrate new ideas more.

Exactly. But technologically oriented.

I hope it will be, but I don't know if it will be the case. But that might be the idea.

I see. Emm some practitioners consider collaboration difficult between the crowd members as they compete with each other in nature. What is your strategy for managing the 'too many chefs in the kitchen' effect?

Well the idea is that there will be a lot of people who will be you know, several universities could take on the problem, and they could still provide the solutions, so there isn't and the gravities are much more managed say environment compared to say other, where problems are just submitted by anybody. So we have a bit more filtering in our platform compared to the other projects.

Aright. But do you think emm do you consider competing against each other is good, like they're going to build on each other's knowledge in a way.

Yes, I mean you mean competing ideas or competing universities, or ... who will be competing? Or the companies submitting the projects?

Like the students ...

Students will be competing against one another, that's right. I mean in some ways it is good yeah, as you said you'll be able to see how the same problem was resolved by others, and they can use the same solutions to build yet another set of solutions. So it's like an ongoing process, until the satisfactory solution was reached as of heart.

Emm tasks should be preferably highly autonomous, explicitly specified and less complex, as they require a variety of skills. Can you add anything else to this?

Well I think that for us it doesn't imply because our task will not be very specific because of the nature of students. So they will have to have some creative freedom in interpreting these things, so the challenges that will be exacting will be much more complicated than let's say translating a book.

But the way that tasks are going to be emm though out, is it gonna be anything else except complex and you know, highly specified, highly autonomous?

Emm well as I said, they are not great to be highly specified, because we would like them to be fuzzy in many ways, so that you students you know, create your freedom to resolve them. So you can't just take and you translate this book. You could say how can you make this book more accessible to this particular

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target audience. So we have located from a slightly different perspective that you would say you know, yeah who answers horsing till I met.

Right. Generally, the higher the reward, the higher the number of solutions and of course, better the performance. Emm do you agree?

Yes!

Aright. What's the sort of reward that you are going to have?

The movement will be the mark that the students will get on their module.

No money involved?

Emm not that we are in more ... it's supposed to depend on the clients that's the end stands that it will not involve any monetary value, no.

But let's say if a company likes the solution that the student gave, will there be any possibility that they would want to take him for ...

Absolutely, yes. So if the company likes the solution they can employ that person because the idea is that these students are building their CVs and ultimately if the company likes their solution, they should be able to hire them.

Wonderful. Will the project be implemented through an own hosted community, like you said right? You didn't choose a third party provider to help you.

That's right.

Ok. Why one against the other?

Well first of all, most of the other crowdsourcing platforms are US based. Only a few I came across many European ones ... Yes... And there is some ... have you seen any European ones?

No no, I was just agreeing with you.

Yea, so there you go. So obviously there are problems with copyright and all sorts of other problems, you know universities is essentially feeding some other ecosystem that doesn't exist in Europe. So, we want to create something that is predominantly university scopeist, which again isn't an existence out there and emm you know, we think that our platform will be, because it is driven by academics you know, with students in mind it will have features that other platforms don't have.

Is your approach expertise based, ideation based or trial and error oriented?

For ... you mean for the emm...

For the whole project ...

So for the project or for the problems that will be submitted?

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Emm I'm referring to the whole project.

Well yes, I mean we have experts obviously around, we have partnership of 13 companies organizations and they have experts in their own rights so that everybody contributes with their experts on so ... yea.

But it's not ... the question is if it is expertise based, ideation based or just a trial and error where it can how, like how can we improve through trial and error?

Well it will be some testing but ultimately we are not leaving the coding part to people that haven't got a clue about programming for example. We have experts who are programmers, we have experts who you know, creative emm you know, interpretation stouts so this ...

I see, so expertise based generally.

Yes.

Do you consider the filtering process as being overly costly and time consuming due to the high number of solutions in each competition?

Emm no.

Which of the three models of crowdsourcing have you opted for - the contest, collaborative or moderated?

I think it will be moderated.

Can you explain why?

Well it is because of the nature of universities pre you know, pre approving problems so everything that will be done will be moderated by essentially your supervisor before students get involved in something. And for the solution is posted as well.

So how do you intend to identify the right solver with the appropriate expertise at the best price?

Well there is no price involved, and anybody can solve it as they like. But ultimately emm you know, it will be self selection in some ways. So maybe it's the other module ... what do we have the three models you said?

Yes its contest, collaborative and moderated.

Maybe the collaborative on although then, so everybody can have a go with everything.

Ok. So in 2010, researchers from New York University estimated around 41% of the jobs offered by Amazon's Mechanical Turk were used to generate spam, click on ads or to influence the results of on search engines. Did you consider this strategy?

Haha well, I know people who have actually done that, so ... and emm Amazon Mechanical Turk is one or ... mechanism itself but ... emm I can't see any value, you know we are not trying to go for low click ... for low sort of type of work that we are trying to put out here.

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I see, you're more ethical.

Well it's not about ethical, we're just doing it for education purposes, we're not doing it to create some spammy content for organizations, yeah.

Emm ... so workers in particular subsections of the paid crowdsourcig industry at least, maybe deny the protection of employment laws, which might emm recourse to vindicate their right. Have you encountered any complications that might arise in applying existing work laws of crowd labour?

Emm this certainly doesn't apply because student will be working on assessed university work, so that's really different.

So it's not contract based.

Not with us, no.

Very well. Emm what is your approach to counter misbehaviour between participants?

Content misbehaviour?

No, to counter, to ...

Counter misbehaviour? Well ultimately they are supervised by academics, so ...

Ok, it's only going to be students working in the project right? It's not students with the workers from the companies.

There is no workers from the companies, it's purely ... the only people who'll be doing the work is the students.

Very well. Emm do you ... what are the barriers that you expect to face?

Emm well persuading the professors or the academics to engage with the platform. And emm the second barrier is persuading the companies to engage with the platform. So if we get these two sorted, it shouldn't be a problem. But again, ultimately we need to make sure that the platform satisfies their needs and hence our sort of be to testing period that we are into.

I see. But you're already going to build aaa you know, image for yourself, so I think it's going to be rather easier for other companies to take part, when they're going to see that there are already partners.

Yes, and that's one of the reasons we've put such a huge European network of people working in that, yea.

Overall, do you consider undertaking crowdsourcing beneficial for the company and in what ways?

Yes, there are multiple things. First of all you have ideas that you wouldn't have thought of, you have an additional resources. And you are collaborating with universities and potentially identifying future employees.

Excellent. Is there anything I haven't covered that you'd like to add?

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Haha, well no nothing that I think you covered ... And then ultimately one of the challenges that we are facing is that crowdsourcing is still emerging concept, and in academic environment it's still sort of very ... you know, for example we could be there we consider as a very bad source of references for students who work with, ultimately there is some really good resources that are coming out of that, so there a lot of perceptions to be changed still, so it's going to be an interesting battle, yeah.

Is there any other project like this that you know of, in Europe?

Emm not that I'm aware of. Any projects in Europe or anywhere else in the world, no.

Aright, so you are the first.

Well I hope so. But you know if you find something else, that's why I'm very interested to see your reports, if you find somebody else doing anything like it, it will be interesting to see what they've been up to.

Of course. I will share it with you as soon as it's ready.

When are you submitting your report?

It's going to be on the first of September.

Right, lucky you. Ok.

Aright, thanks very much for the opportunity and your time.

Thank you and good luck!

Appendix 2. Interview Elaine Warburton & Maggie Love, QuantuMDx

Can you tell me a bit more about the project? What is it about in terms of crowdsourcing especially? Not the crowdfunding part, the crowdsourcing. It’s basically based on your design right? For the device.

Yes so if I can just take one step back. So QuantuMDx is developing the world’s first hand-held laboratory into which you put a disease specific cartridge. Hold on let me just get one for you. So the whole point is that we have this hand-held reader ... let me put that up (shows mock-up on Skype screen)... with a display, very easy to use, although this is just a non-working mock-up. And then we have disease specific cartridge, such as a malaria cartridge or we'll have, let's say, a DNA profiler and such like, and we’ve miniaturized an entire laboratory, a molecular laboratory and put it on to a credit card size cartridge, that will probably end up being about this size (shows mock up of cartridge over skype screen). So a doctor, a health professional, a nurse, technician, biologist or similar can take a sample of blood, pop it on to the cartridge, and then you pop the cartridge into the device, press go… Literally you have a molecular test at the point of care, sample to result in about 15 minutes. This has never been done before!

It's an amazing project.

I know, I know.... and just so you know we should be taking our first proper working prototype next week which should be very very exciting! So now to QuantuMDx, we are pretty comfortable right now. We’ve been around for 6 years and the Board of Directors have have much experience in raising funds. Historically, we’ve worked with venture capitalists and such like, and this time, for QuantuMDx, we

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decided we do not want to go down the institutional routes such as banks and the venture capitalists, because we are making a highly innovative device that is going to be focused on developing countries such as Africa, India, and anywhere where there is a resource scarce setting, as well as developed countries. We felt that the venture capitalists wouldn’t understand the business mode. Furthermore there's a huge unmet need, about 4 billion people don’t have access to complex first world molecular diagnostics. Venture capitalists take you down one particular route for quick profits and we probably wouldn’t be able to continue our humanitarian vision. So we became very smart over the last few years about raising funds. We raised non-equity diluting funds, grants from the Technology Strategy Board, European Union, we also had a big South African grant. We’ve leveraged those find with equity funding from business angels, high-network individuals and philanthropists. So our shareholders are philanthropists and high-networth individuals, who allowed us the flexibility to continue our humanitarian vision to develop and deliver molecular diagnostics for everyone at a very low cost but highly accurate, highly portable and very easy to use.

So as a smart SME we've always look at different ways of raising funds, and I noticed a Kickstarter campaign in the news so looked at the Kickstarter website for crowdfunding ideas. Kickstarter could advertise medical devices. Then I looked at other crowdfunding websites which required equity to be given away. We didn’t want equity to be given away, we’ve got lots of people to provide us with that. What we wanted to do was raise the profile of our device amongst normal individuals in the world, the likes of you, me, and everyone and, we found a website called Indiegogo. We felt that that was a very good fit for a company like ours. It had devices as projects but it also had a humanitarian flair as well and we are very much humanitarian focused. So what better way of getting the word out to as many people as possible as well as through traditional routes like health care professionals? We always thought that our technology should be for the people, so wouldn't it be great if people could make a small contribution to support us in getting our device out into developing countries. So worked up a focused campaign, we did a lot of work over 6 to 9 months working out the campaign and researching successful projects, and talking to Indiegogo about what we needed to do to develop a good project. So we very much focused on one assay, with our device. Because we're not actually giving the world a device, like many other indiegogo campaign as ours is a medical device, we had to find different perks. It is not ethically right to put a medical device in someone’s hands. Maybe in the future, but not now.

So we chose malaria because the disease is especially interesting, there's a huge unmet need about offering very rapid diagnostics for drug resistance patients to people out in resource scarce settings to enable them to be given the right drugs to basically cure their malaria. We chose malaria and we chose a clinical trial as well for people to fund, to get the device out in Gabon, Africa. Well we have one trial there. So that's the background of why we chose Indiegogo and why we chose malaria.

Aright, this is the background for the crowdfunding. I'm ... from what I got from reading from the website, you're actually going to crowdsource, or you did actually crowdsource the design of the device?

We did crowdsource the design of the device, but it hasn’t been as successful as we thought it might be.

Oh, why is that?

Our crowd sourcing idea was about engaging the public to provide design ideas and a new name. What people were more interested in, as we found out, was the whole concept of the device. They didn't really want to know about changing the name and they didn’t really wanted to design it themselves. They just wanted to spread the word about what this device was going to do to support diagnostics in resource scarce settings. And millions of people who are dying every day of various diseases which can potential be curable if diagnosed earlier. So the feedback that we actually got was more marketing and more

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evangelical, than of here's the design, here's what I prepared earlier, it should look like Star Trek’s Tricorder, it should look like this ... it should have this device functionality. So we didn't actually get too much interest from that. It was more spreading the word, as I said before in a more evangelical way. But the global interest was just utterly amazing and completely not what we were expecting. I mean to get so much international interest from all over the world, I mean literally all over the world. It went viral. It was awesome. When we launched this campaign it did feel that it was a high risk cuz we weren't delivering a device as a perk, like most other companies, we chose other perks, but it was either going to make a lot of money, or just a little bit of money, or it was going to do what we all hoped by going viral, globally. It was the best public relations campaign which was done with a tiny bit of money. So that was very good.

So you basically consider that it's an acceleration in innovation for your crowdsourcing campaign?

I would say much more than acceleration in innovation. There are a lot of very very good people who support us on the technical side. We work with partners all around the world, who are amazingly specialists in their particular area of expertise. We have taken a whole lab, and put it into a credit card sized cartridge. The real benefit of Indiegogo is that it raised the profile that technology such as ours will be coming into mainstream medicine. That's a really important point because there is nothing like our device at the moment on the market. You can get yes no answers for HIV, TB testing etc if someone takes a drop of blood, pops it into a very cheap lateral flow cartridge, and the outcome is a yes/no answer. Their very rapid tests just give an indicator that a patient might be HIV positive, but you can't be 100% certain, you then have to take a further test and send it to a central laboratory. So what we did was started people talking our device and advice and enthusiasm is what we're now continuing to receive. The campaign is finished now, but we're continuing to receive people feeding back on their thoughts, asking us about updates, asking us about how they can help. Asking whether it needs new tests on, or different tests on or... So we’ve kind of engaged with the world population. Which is fantastic!

It is. So actually your became more transparent, your organization became transparent after this project?

Yea, yes we did. And we now speak to many, many people around the world. Not only big institutions but also general public, which is great. They're keeping really interested.

And of course you consider it a benefit?

Oh huge benefit, because one of the things when you’re introducing a disruptive new technology, a radical new medical device into mainstream medicine and you want the end users to consult with such as the nurses, the technicians, the health professionals to use it, you could have the most amazing technology. But if it doesn't fit with traditional clinical practice or what health professionals believe a device should look like, or work like, then you'll have problems introducing it into mainstream medicine. So by engaging with end users very very early on, their helping us to direct the look, the feel, the functionality, you know, how big it should be, how portable it should be, should it have a docking station, should it have connectivity, should it have this that and the other. So they're telling us what they want. They now know the technology is out there, that it can do most things a laboratory can do, we just need their feedback to say just what they want to do, so they can shape it for their needs, and then it can go out into the market when is ready and regulated.

Emm I'm guessing there is no loss of intellectual property in the project?

We have completely secured our intellectual property from 2008 when we actually launched the company. So we've used some very high profile biotech IP attorneys at in California, to direct us in

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making sure that our intellectual property is safe, it's fine. We're also quite careful as well, if someone came up with a design, that is their intellectual property, and then we'll work something through, but actually that didn’t quite happened. But people are continuing to come to us on that side.

Alright, I was actually more prepared about the ... you know, the crowdsourcing part, so actually ...

Yes ... it wasn't as ... crowdsourcing wasn’t taken up as much as we though it might be taken up. Which is interesting. Maybe we didn't quite pitch it right to our audience. Maybe there were too many messages being portrayed so the crowdsourcing became buried in the excitement of the device. The messages please can you help us design our device, we want your own input into it. That may have been too buried in the campaign, cuz people saw malaria, they saw a device, they wanted to know more about the device and how it was going to help millions of people especially the half a million children that die each year from malaria. Maybe they just weren’t interested in the design and name? So too many messages came out. Next time maybe, when we actually have a device out there, that people can actually see properly working maybe that's something we could ask people’s input for. Right now we're in the process of getting the industrial design side now, maybe we’re ready to look to crowdsourcing again. I don't know, it's something for us to think about. For crowdsourcing ideas that should be something to think about in the next few months.

So are there any tools for quality control, as in also vulnerability of malicious attacks?

Yes, huge! We are developing the device to FDA, Food and Drugs Administration standards, and they are very stringent, they are very tight. We will be potentially uploading and downloading individual data from the device into a hospital database or a pathology database or something like that, we have to be very secure. Very secure on making sure there's no leakage, making sure that someone can't get hold of data so we’re making sure it’s all encrypted. So we have put a lot of time and effort into making sure this device fortified and secure.

Emm arigh. One second, I'm just trying to accommodate the questions for ...

Maggie, Maggie you want to come in? I was talking to Cristian right now. I've got Maggie here now ...

Aright, hi Maggie! Hehe.

So she actually owned the main campaign. Maggie coordinated everything.

Hi Cristian!

Hi Maggie! You aright?

Nice to finally meet you!

You too!

So what have we been talking about ... Cristian has been asking some questions about the background, but particularly wants to focus on the crowdsourcing of ideas, which actually didn't really work, so I'm just saying it might be that it became buried as we focused the campaign on a clinical trial, as opposed to ... a secondary one which was the crowdsourcing of ideas. But it may be that actually we killed the crowdsourcing by focusing on our device. Maybe you want to talk a bit more about that.

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You didn't actually considered the next campaign of crowdsourcing?

Yea, I think crowdsourcing isn't really something I see much about when we were searching how we were going to run a crowdfunding campaign, it was all very much focused on you know, product launches, so there wasn't too much focus on crowdsourcing of information, but actually that would be really cool.

Yea, that's right actually. We wanted to bring that aspect into it, but it really didn't take off as much. But that's probably because it was being in different platform, and that isn't what Indiegogo needed or used to.

Can I just ask you why did you go with Indiegogo and not developed your own community platform?

It was the audience and the fact that they had a huge audience on already. And then not that you don't bring a lot of it in yourself, but they have kind of a way of amplifying your audience, so once we have brought in our initial like profile raising, then actually they amplified a lot. We were told that when we got on the front page, it would make a huge splash... yeah, it didn't do anything so...didn't do anything at all. Emm when we got mentioned in one particular Facebook group which had nothing to do with Indiegogo, just a technology group, we got mentioned by them, and our funding increased by 50% in a matter of hours. But with Indiegogo and the front page... nothing. But you know, it doesn’t really help to be on a platform just because its kind of people has heard of them, it's familiar, it's just the safety of giving your money to a platform that they're already familiar with.

Of course. Alright, I'm just trying to go through the questions I prepared for the crowdsourcing actually. But it's a really interesting, I was just checking, your project is amazing. I just wanted to tell you, I'm admiring it!

It would be interesting to hear the questions you were going to ask us, cuz that may help us in the next campaign.

Alright, so emm basically I just wanted to ask you ... there are 3 types of crowdsourcing. The contest, it's collaborative and it's moderated type. So basically if you do a contest for example for the sourcing of ideas, you'll have to put a reward system in place for it... and collaborative maybe even through volunteering ... basically you didn't consider any of them till now?

We ... I think with the Indiegogo campaign, the kind of piece of crowdsourcing that we wanted to do was actually a contest. So people were asked to give us ideas when they contributed in order to bring money in. Anyone who contributed any amount of money, whether it's just a dollar or a hundred dollars or whatever, anyone who contributed in the campaign, could contribute with an idea for the name of the design. But it just didn't work. I think if we were gonna do another one, we’d have to research deeper. I'm not really familiar with any crowdsourcing platform.

There are a lot, but basically companies might even tend to do it themselves, trying to build their own community and try to build on that. Because then you know, you're attracting more market share, and customers that are actually interested just in your project.

I think we ended up with a couple hundred contributors through the crowdfunding campaign. We kind of have a starting point if we ever wanted to do crowdsourcing. And they weren't very engaged a lot of them.

Tell you the truth, actually it would be really interesting to contact you again after you did a crowdsourcing campaign to see where you went, you that be fine? For my future research.

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Of course!

How did you motivate the participation on the crowdfunding platform?

Extensive use of social media and our media contacts plus friends, family and collaborators. We spent 6 months building up our social media networks. We also sent out "teaser" campaigns on You Tube, Facebook, Twitter etc. We went out to digital conferences such as CES, Wired etc.

Can I just ask you what is the real benefit of crowdfunding for your company?

Raising awareness amongst global audience, and I mean global, not just you know UK, US, Europe. We had a lot of interest from all over the world. We even had an article in Russian, we had articles in so many different languages. I remember quite a few Dutch ones, and Spanish, African, Nigerian one and we always get quite a few Indian haha. We've got a lot of coverage. We also had very much interest from potential investors and more like institutions and how it actually ran, because we were probably the first truly serious biotech to use the Indiegogo platform, and then coupled with our humanitarian focus as well that hasn't been done before, cuz most of the products on there are humanitarian focused projects, services or consumer gadgets, and we were neither. A bit in-between. We ended up with a lot of interest from scientists, but also journalists approaching us. This is the one thing that caught their eye. It is very difficult as there is no money flowing around at the moment, so as I said before institutions are pushing the goal post further and further apart, and the bar higher and higher and higher, so you have to develop a device even further into your development pathway than usual, and so you have to be quite nimble in finding these unusual sources of funding like crowdfunding. We were able to achieve our vision. We are a very innovative company, and this is something that actually proved it.

Wonderful. Aright, thank you very much both of you for your time!

Not at all, and keep in touch. If there's any questions then just drop us another email.

That would be perfect! Thank you and have a lovely day!

You too, thanks, byeee!

Appendix 3. Interview 1

Are you aware of crowdsourcing practices and could you name a few?

To be honest, I have no idea. Now I’m working as, like, PR, but I have no idea about the crowdsourcing thing.

Basically, crowdsourcing is when a company has a problem, it can issue it through the internet to the crowd. So workers from around the world, through the internet, can give their knowledge, resources, ideas into solving a problem of any kind. They crowdsource for designs, for business problems that they face, stuff like that.

Sounds like and awesome idea.

Have you taken part in any crowdsourcing projects? If not, would you be interested in the future?

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No. But basically I would be interested, because I like working with people and that's mostly what I do so I would like to do it but...

It's not like you really interact with others face to face. It's a task, it's online, it’s not face to face interacting.

I got it.

And in what field are you interested in taking part of according to your professional skills or hobbies?

PR mostly.

Would you do it for the financial benefit or for the real value of your work and for the chance of creating something of meaning that would be recognized and have your voice heard?

Well, of course that you need both. I mean, it's for the best if you do something that you love because it rewards much better than doing something that you don't like just for the money. So I'd basically do it for both reasons.

Would you do it as a part time job or as a full time one, considering that payment can be less, but tasks are more specific and take less time to complete?

Full time.

So you would devote your full time in working for crowdsourcing projects? Freelance in crowdsourcing projects.

For now, yes. For now I would do it. For now I need to learn, basically, more and more. So I need to improve my skills in time and start from the basic, you know? And I know that with time you gain experience and so on, and you know how to do your stuff, your own things, your own projects.

So you're telling me that you'd do it even for the learning, not even for financial incentives or for the creational value of your work. Just trying to learn something from each task.

I think from each task you're gonna have a benefit. I mean if you learn something, even if it doesn't help you right now, you don't get money out of it maybe, you can still gain contacts, things for the future business or for what you do.

Sometimes the employer might not be happy with your work and ask you to redo it, or just correct the mistakes. Would you be tempted to take care of the problem, or abort the project?

I would be happy to do it again if my work is like... actually it depends. Because, of course, if my work is bullshit, I don't know, if it sucks and it doesn't help for the purpose of the project and so on, or if we didn't reach the target that we needed, then yes, I would be happy to redo it because I probably wouldn't be happy with myself about what I've done. But if I believe in it and I think it works, then I would probably say something about it.

Would you be open to implement a crowdsourcing project, or competition for a problem that you are facing? This can be an individual problem as well, a corporate project. Can you name the problem?

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Yes, I think it's a good idea. If I can talk to people, then maybe they can help me with solving my problem, then yes, why not?

Do you have a specific problem in mind?

Now no, to be honest, because I'm not facing any problems at the moment.

There is no problem in your work field that you faced?

At the moment no.

Will you take part in a project/competition where you are not confident in the skills it asks for?

No.

Not even to try your hand? Because basically it's a competition on tasks. So there's like 10 or 100 people working on each task. If 100 people and you are working on that task and you give the best solution, you're going to win it. You're going to win the prize for it. The prize being money, or whatever it is. Your satisfaction, if it's a volunteering project. But basically, would you do it even if you're not confident in your skills, or not?

Mostly, if.... No. If I'm getting into something, I'm beginning something that I really like to do, and I really think I can perform, and so on. Not like ... I'd rather learn before and be really confident with myself than just go in there to see ... I don't know... to be medium. I'd rather be on top than go in just for the... I don't know.

On top of what? You're working from your own space, whenever you want, from a park or wherever, for a task, along with 100,000 people, more probably, just through the internet. So you're not actually facing anyone. You can even try your hand. That's what I'm telling you. You can try.

No... It depends a lot. I'm not sure about this. I mean if I'm getting in something, with people that I have to be in competition with, no. But if there is something that I can learn off of it, or I can find out skills that I didn't know about, if there's something to gain out of it, then yeah, I'd go in for it.

Ok.

Will you be willing to financially support a project you like or believe in? What is your maximum?

Yes. I have no idea how much. It depends on my income, you know?

Of course. But it can be a 10 Pound or it can be 1000 Pounds.

A 10 pounds... everyone has it.

Of course everyone has it, but not everyone wants to give it away for someone else or for a project to come alive.

I believe 10 pouds is easy to give if it's something you believe in. But about 1000 Pounds, you have to think a lot of times. First of all if you have the money, and secondly if you support the cause, if you share the vision.

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Do you think companies should listen to their customers more when developing a new product or service?

Yes, I believe the customer is the main focus of every company and he should be basically the most important thing in whatever happens because he's the fire. If you want him to come back, or to become loyal, or to do whatever, then it's better to focus on the customer. It's less important to focus on the product.

In which specific industry do you consider crowdsourcing should be implemented more aggressively? And why?

Well... Basically, every business, because they're all mostly facing problems and stuff. And all the time people can come with solutions. There are things that you might not think about as a manager or whatever you're working in the company, and someone else might think about it, so it would be faster.

Is there any industry in particular that you'd view to benefit a lot from crowdsourcing? A specific industry.

I don't know. No. I cannot think about one in particular.

Really? Food industry for example, telecommunication, whatever...

Yes, but that's like every business. Everything. I don't know what to say. If I would have to say one in particular... I don't know what to say right now because...

So basically you're saying every industry can benefit from crowdsourcing. Is that what you're saying?

Well... no... I mean.... I don't know what industries. I think every company can have a need for solutions.

Ok, fine. Leave it.

If the motivational factors (such as monetary rewards) are insufficient, will you still give your solution to the best of your knowledge?

Yes. I mean, why not? Normally I'd rather respect the company and people I'm working with. If they are not happy with what I'm doing, then maybe I need to talk to someone or find another job. But as long as I'm working for the company, I think that I should do my best. That's my opinion.

13. If a competitor company would approach you with the intention of a malicious attack against the company issuing a project, what would be your response? This relates to payment to give the wrong answers and potentially undermining the project.

I would speak to my company. Because if I start working with the company, and I believe in it, and I'm trying to help out and stuff, and I know I'm good at what I'm doing... I would try to get performance for my company, rather than just running from one to another.

What about if you're not working for a specific company and there are tasks that just go against crowdsourcing projects and you get paid just to make it harder or increase the time span of the project with your answers? What would it be? You'd basically not take part in the crowdsourcing project.

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The point is I'm not up for that either. I wouldn't be up for that either. If I'm working, I'm minding my own business and I'm trying to do the best out of my business. But not to just like, destroy others' work that way. I'd rather just... I don't think it's the right way to go up with business.

If you would make a break-through discovery or innovate something of great commercial value, while under the norms of the project, will you ask for its intellectual property?

Yeah, of course.

Are you aware that in most cases, the copyright will belong to the crowdsourcer?

Well... yes...But still like... you can still have rights, like a patent or stuff.

Most companies, when you're building on a project, because there's a community working for the solution, we can't really point towards the person who should be granted the intellectual property for the solution. So you'd not be able to get it anyway, because it belongs to the community already.

As long as I'm happy with what I'm doing, with the community and everything, if I put myself in a community like this and I would be happy with my work then yeah, it's no problem, because I'm working with people and so on... But it depends. I'm rather competitive but at the same time I like to mind my own business and to do the things right. But this is kind of really complicated in the business world.

Projects generally imply collaborating with other participants while competing on the same price. What is your view on that? Beneficial or detrimental?

It's beneficial because you can still learn from the others, they can learn from you and so on. But at the same time you have to be competitive. I don't know. I told you, I'm not up for things for nothing, not to gain anything. At least information, at least... something.

Do you see this activity attractive for enriching your CV?

It's not... I don't know...

Let's say you took part in a successful crowdsourcing project and you actually gave the solution that won the prize. So, would you pride with it on your CV or not?

Yes, why not? If it's work that I've done, important for my field, for what I'm studying, it's welcome on my CV, right? Why would I hide it?

Would you work pro-bono on a project if you support the cause?

Yes.

If you identify misbehaviour between other participants, would you take the action of reporting it?

I would normally first talk to them and try to solve the problems, before trying to talk to someone else. I'd rather talk right with the participants disturbing me, or the community.

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Is there anything that you would like to add?

No. I don't know what to add. It's the first time I heard of this, I never had something to do with it... So I cannot say that much about it.


Ok first question. Emm are you aware of crowdsourcing practices and could you name a few?

Yes, I am aware of these types of practices but I do not know solid examples. I know that they are used in many fields, but mostly what I know of are concerned with design issues.

Ok. Second question. Have you taken part in any crowdsourcing projects? If not, would you be interested in the future?

I did not take part in a crowdsourcing project yet, but I would definitely want to do so. I believe that this is one of the best ways of getting the right outcome, actually the best one. When there are tens, hundreds of ideas where to choose from, the probability of choosing a bad one is very close to 0.


Architecture.

Just architecture? What exactly in architecture would you be interested in taking part of?

For example in design projects, or technical projects. From small jobs such as decorating and furniture designing, to extensions, additions, or emmm why not, a project from scratch. It's a great way for freelancers to make a name for themselves and work in the comfort of their home, making their program emm as flexible as they need it to be if they have busy lives.

Nice. Emm would you do it for the financial benefit or for the real value of your work and for the chance of creating something of meaning that would be recognized and have your voice heard?

Emm definitely for my personal satisfaction which I would get from creating something meaningful and making other people happy. I think having your voice heard in the field I am working in is quite hard, as nowadays there are too many people who are trying to make themselves a name. When it comes to art, as architecture is art, everything is relative. Emm there can be some people loving your ideas, while on the other hand others could completely hate it haha. This is the reason I believe crowdsourcing is the best opportunity for some artists which are not understood by everyone.

So you're not interested in the financial part at all?

No. Not necessarily. Personally, I am not interested in the financial part because I create spaces for people to enjoy and make them happy, make them feel safe and at home. My satisfaction comes from my clients' satisfaction.


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I would do it part time.

Alright. Payment can be less, but task can be more specific and take less time to complete, so if you do it part time it implies that you could take more projects at the same time. Sooo part time?

Yes. Part time because I need to have financial security, a full time job where I am doing the projects I am emm told to do, but then I would take the crowdsourcing projects to feed my personal joy and not have designated boundaries.

So you're socially aware. That's good. But sometimes the employer might not be happy with your work and ask you to re-do it, or just correct the mistakes. Would you be tempted to take care of the problem, or abort the project?

In architecture you always have to do more types … more examples, different interpretations of the client's needs, so it wouldn't be a problem.

In this case, would you be open to implement a crowdsourcing project, or competition for a problem that you are facing? This can be an individual problem as well, a corporate project.

Yes.

So you do recognise the power of the crowd in solving a problem.

Yes of course … because you have a wide range of choices and you can choose the one that suits you best.

Will you take part in a project where you are not confident in the skills it asks for?

Emm my first answer would be no… but then that's why it's called crowdsourcing. I would do my best if I would be extremely concerned with that problem, and if the person who initiated the project does not like my solution, then I have nothing to lose, but actually to gain more experience… and who knows, maybe even confidence. Soo it depends on how much time I would have because you can always do some research and sort the problem out.

So will you be willing to financially support a project you like or believe in?

Yes. Definitely yes.

Small sums or it depends on the project?

It depends on the project, I suppose.

So basically with small sums? Because you know, every penny counts.

I can't pronounce myself if I would support projects with small or big sums… emm it depends how small and how big those sums are? It depends on how much I would believe in that specific project. There are many variations and external factors which would contribute in the decision making. But in general, in between small and medium sums. If it would be a project that would share the same believes as mine, then I believe I would do anything in my power to help achieve it.

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Definitely. We are living in a world where resources are wasted and things should be done in such ways to fulfil exactly the clients' needs. Nothing more, nothing less.

In which specific industry do you consider crowdsourcing should be implemented more aggressively?

Uhm… In the food market for example. And then in art. In the fields where there is liberty and creativity. Creativity never stops and some people just don't have resources or the chance to make themselves known, even if they could be the next Michelangelo haha.

Nice… If the motivational factors are insufficient, will you still give your solution to the best of your knowledge?

Of course.

Even if the payment is not as much as you'd like?

Well it obviously depends how big the difference is, but...

Ok, let's say that you had a project beforehand, and this next project, even if it's from another company, is just paid less.

Well… yes because it would take me less time as I did it before.

So basically you would be interested in just repeating a kind of skill-based project.

Yes.

Ok, so if a competitor company would approach you with the intention of a malicious attack against the company issuing a project, what would be your response?

That's a tough one.

Obviously, they would offer you a lot more...

No, no I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do that. No.

Could you tell me why?

It is a moral choice of doing the right thing and not hurting others.


I would.

Are you aware that in most cases the company would not give you the intellectual property?

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Yes, but I would do my best to obtain it.

Ok. Projects generally imply collaborating with other participants while competing on the same price. What is your view on that?

Emm teamwork is always good because good ideas come from debates, so... more people, better ideas.

But most times, like generally in this kind of projects there's the effect of 'too many chefs in the kitchen' which sometimes demotivate the participants and just lose faith and interest in the projects.

Well then you don't have the right employees.

Correct. That's correct. Do you see this activity attractive for enriching your cv?

Of course. It's a great way to demonstrate that you are better than others, as people chose you. It demonstrates that you can adapt easily to different circumstances.


Definitely yes… In the end it is about helping each other to create a better world, a better environment. I think I would save some time for at least one pro-bono project a month. If it's for a good cause, I wouldn't have to think twice.


Yes. It is a competition, isn't it? So play fare under the same rules as everybody else.


I hope that people could be more aware of the benefits of crowdsourcing.



Actually, I don’t know that much about the subject. Yes, I am aware that crowdsourcing is being implemented by some companies, but I may be wrong about it actually means. Ummm.... I think it’s when a company has a problem and it relies on some group of people to solve it, using mostly social media or some internet platform. Those people aren’t necessarily specialists, just the general public, and the company calls out on the public to try to propose a solution to a certain issue. Although I think it may be able to target a specific group, but I don’t have information about how effective that turns out to be. It’s likely that, mostly, there is a wide range of backgrounds, skills and experience within the group. I guess that can make it harder to evaluate the answers? Anyway, If I were to guess, I think it’s probably implemented in designing, marketing, gaming, designing new products and services or new features for existing ones ... Dunno, hope I answered you question.


No, I haven’t. Not that I wouldn’t, but it’s not such a wide-spread practice, especially here in Romania, and no information about such project being conducted ever reached me. Otherwise I probably would’ve

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taken part in one. I mean...it sounds like an interesting experience. I need to have some free time to do this, and at the moment I have other priorities, but who knows? I mean, why not? I’d give it a try.


Well, I may be of use in creative projects, something artistic like ....ummmm... designing certain things, for example car prototypes, but just the outside part of course, or maybe ads, or even in architecture. I guess I’d even take part in scientific research, especially in physics or astronomy, because that always fascinated me, but mostly I’d go for projects in marketing, which is my field of expertise... kind of.... I still have much more to learn in order to fully become a professional.


To me, it’s more motivating to know that I did something meaningful and valuable. And I’d try it for the experience of doing something different. But I probably wouldn’t get involved in a more complex project if I didn’t get some financial benefit as well. So it’s a combination of the two, for me at least.


Well, I wasn’t aware that you can get paid for this enough to consider it a full time job. I have no idea regarding the numbers implied here, really... And aaaaa.... I guess right now I’d have to go for a part time thing, because I already have a full time job. But if I were unemployed, I’d consider taking part in a more complex project, especially if it’s relevant to my experience. In general, more complex projects appeal to me more, because I like mental challenges and the satisfaction of performing well in something that isn’t easy is always higher.


I’m actually a perfectionist. So I usually do more than what’s expected of me. Yeah, of course I’d willingly correct the mistakes and actually be grateful for the feedback. Self-improvement and personal development are very important to me. But...aaa... I guess I would be tempted to abort the project if it took too long for the problem to be solved. I mean if it took really long to solve the problem and I’d see no progress towards reaching a solution. I’m not a very patient person, and I usually want quick results. Especially regarding things that depend on me. So, to answer your question: I’d do my best and improve my work as many times as needed. That’s how you learn, after all. If I’m in it and I thought it’s worth spending my time on it, then I need to make it worthwhile. I like to finish what I started, otherwise it’s just a waste of time to me.


(Laugh) I didn’t expect you to ask about personal problems being solved through a crowdsourcing project. I don’t know what to say. I usually like to take care of my business myself. So I guess I am not that interested right now. I guess I am not as open as I thought I was ... Anyway, some corporate problems can be successfully solved through crowdsourcing. For example, right now I’m thinking that establishing the routes and timetables for a public transport company might possibly benefit from a crowdsourcing project. Redesigning those should definitely take into consideration people’s mobility needs and it might

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be done more efficiently if not only the public transport department would be responsible for establishing those.


Ummm... No. No, I would take any such project as a challenge, a learning experience. But if I can’t add any value, why would I be in the project? I wouldn’t like to be involved in something I know little about. Even if ideas sometimes come unexpectedly, given the right setting and mindset, more likely than not my contribution would be useless, and I’d just waste my time.


I would financially support projects regarding medical research regarding rare deseases, which probably don’t receive enough funding. I guess it has to do with making this world a better place, for me at least. I think a maximum for me would be 1000 £, because of my limited income, but it really should be something I believe in and I should feel like it can make a difference.


Yeah. Definitely. After all, the customers are those people they make them for, right? It’s beneficial for both parts. And I am sure that customers would be more inclined to buy if they feel important and taken into consideration. We all like personalized things and feeling important...


Social media, marketing and public relations could benefit greatly from such an approach. Anything from designing ads, commercials, to improving sales techniques and product and service-related R&D could be done partially through crowdsourcing projects, as this would possibly bring an original approach to these issues, from the consumer’s point of view, even more so than right now. I mean, what’s more efficient that a customer showing you what he or she wants to see or hear from you? I think it would bring a fresh take and it’s worth giving it a shot.


Yes, of course. I’m either doing it with the best of my knowledge or not at all. Why bother waste time otherwise? I think that if something’s worth doing, then it’s worth doing well.

If a competitor company would approach you with the intention of a malicious attack against the company issuing a project, what would be your response? This relates to payment to give the wrong answers and potentially undermining the project.

Wow! No, I would never willingly undermine a project. Of course, I would turn down the offer and report the other company’s attempt to the company that issued the project. I’d also try to talk the other company’s representative out of the whole thing. It’s not fair and I can’t stand unfair practice and aaaa...... I guess no one would do this, unless paid very large amounts of money. And I am not too sure about the amount of money necessary to keep people silent and cooperative. I think probably at least ten times the

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amount paid by the company that initated the project. Dunno... I don’t think it’s productive to think like that, but I guess it can happen. But I’d definitely do my best to stop or limit such a practice.


That’d be awesome! Of course I would!


Well I am now (laugh). No, I wasn’t aware of it. Well, actually I didn’t think about this. But it does make sense. Oh well... I’d probably come to terms with it in the end. After all, I may have never turned my attention in that direction, had it not been that theoretical project. So I’d just end up being proud of myself without having financial benefits from my idea. Well.... good enough I guess. Maybe I’d end up being a consultant for the company, or something. Anyway, I’d definitely try to explore that direction even further, as I can probably improve on my own idea or modify it into something even better.


Hmmm ... interesting question... Competition is good because it tends to make people work harder and try to bring the best solution they can come up with. But I’d say competing on the same price is detrimental to collaboration between participants, especially regarding knowledge and experience sharing, because they’d probably tend to hold back on knowledge, partially or fully, or even keep to themselves an important piece of information just so that they can win in the competition of solutions. Theoretically, in my opinion, more people should come up with a better solution. If led right, a group that actually relies on teamwork could achieve better results.


Yes, definitely! I think it’s a useful and interesting experience and it would be good to add it to a CV, especially if it’s related to your knowledge or experience. It shows interest, it shows commitment to a cause and also, if your solution is chosen, it shows the quality of your expertise. Especially if you’re young and don’t have many years of experience in a field, this can be a very useful tool.


Yes, yes I would. If I am passionate about something and I enjoy what I’m doing, yeah! But if I don’t like what it implies, I mean if it’s really boring, I wouldn’t get involved. Even if I support the cause, I think I wouldn’t give it my time. Time is very valuable to me. I’d rather support the cause with money. I’m not so sure really, it depends. It depends on how strongly I feel about the cause. I confused you, right? (laugh) Ok, well, as a conclusion, if it’s a cause I strongly believe in then I’d work pro-bono, otherwise no, not unless it’s very interesting.


I’m not sure what you mean by misbehaviour....but I don’t think it’s my job to monitor what other people are doing. That doesn’t generally interest me in the least. I just stick to what I’m doing or what I can add to the project. So no, I don’t think I’d report anyone or anything. Even if something is suspicious in some

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way, although I can’t think of anything like that right now, it’s not my right to judge that other participants are saying or doing.


No, I don’t think so. Thanks for this. It’s been a really interesting interview.


Are you aware of any crowdsourcing practices? Can you name a few? Any platforms?

Yes, Apple.

Ok. Kinckstarter? Don't you know Kickstarter?

No.

Have you taken part on a crowdsourcing project?

I haven't...

But will you be open to take part in one in the future?

Of course! 100%...

Nice. Why?

Why? Because emm... I believe like anything I made, I believe the people have enquiries about it. They have ... they need some features, they need to put some stuff. So if you ask them, if you know what's your costumers needs, you're gonna sell more, you're gonna spread more, your going to get more reputation. People are going to love you.

Will you implement a crowdsourcing project, or work on one providing your skills or you know ... knowledge?

Yea with my knowledge.

In what field would you be interested in taking part of according to your professional skills or hobbies?

Both! Seriously both.

Yes, but in what field?

Emm techonology, electronics.

Ok. Is there anything specific in electronics and technology?

Emm yea it's room for innovation in any electronics.

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Would you do it for the financial benefit or for the value created?

The value that I create.

So financial concerns is not so important for you?

As long as I'm satisfied with my work.

Would you do it as part-time job or a full-time job, considering that payment can be less, but tasks are more specific and take less time to complete?

Full time.

So you would rather not have a traditional full-time job, but freelance between other companies?

Exactly.

Ok. Sometimes, the employer might not be happy with the work done, as ask you to redo it. Would you be inclined to correct it or abort the project?

I would definitely remake it. I would want to perfect my work.

Would you be open to implement a crowdsourcing project or competition for a problem that you are facing in your field or daily life? As in do you recognise the power of the crowd?

I would definitely, and mostly try to implement it in any problem I face, to improve me... because it can make you more aware of everything that's going around and the different mind-sets that people have. I would always want to get more views from the field, so I will get more knowledge about everything you know?

Would you take part in a project where you are not completely confident in the skills they ask for?

Yes, that's where I would want to improve!

Will you be willing to financially support a project that you like or believe in?

Yes, I like seeing people doing cool stuff, and I would help them and invest in them.


I wish the companies ask the people when they produce something, not produce something and then ask the people how's the product.


Haha in everything. There are a lot. Emm... Networks, like telephones... O2, Vodafone, all these companies are missing it.

What would you say O2 can improve through crowdsourcing?

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Like a lot of things related to signals, related to ... like coverage area... or relating to missing signals... related to underground things. When you're travelling underground, you don't get coverage, and they're not asking people if they want this. And people need it. They still need phones, and they still have tunnels and you can connect your circuits there.

I also think marketing can benefit a lot from crowdsourcing.

If the motivational factors are insufficient, will you still give your solution to the best of your knowledge?

Yes. If you're talking about money, then not quite important. I would even work for free, just from the need to create.

If a competitor company would approach you with the intention of a malicious attack against the company issuing the project, what would be your response?No I'm not going to do it. But I might move if I feel the company I'm working for is not performing well on crowdsourcing norms.

If you make a breakthrough discovery or innovate something of great commercial value, while under the norms of the project, will you ask for it's intellectual property?

Yes!

Are you aware that companies might not grant you it?

Yes, but I would fight for it and show it to all other participants, and start it as a new project. But the norms are already signed for, and in the beginning you need to sacrifice sometimes, to get to a higher position. Because if I discover something, I'm the one that will be able to make it better, I'm the one with the idea. So these things might give you good opportunities in other companies.

Projects generally imply collaborating with each other, while competing for the same price in the same time. What is your view on that?

Emm it's good. Because this is motivation itself, it helps you share your vision and learn from each other. I for one feel like I'm better when improving something, not necessarily creating something for example.

Do you see this activity attractive to enrich your CV?

Yes, absolutely.

Would you work for free, volunteer on a project if you support the cause?

Yes.

If you identify misbehaviour between other participants, will you take the action of reporting it and why?

I would report it especially if it is harming the community. It could compromise the whole project. But I think I would first approach them directly, and then report it if they continue.

Ok thanks very much!

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My pleasure!


Are you aware of any crowdsourcing practices? Name a few.

Emm I think it's where people put their ideas on the internet, and then there are people who comment about it. From what I know it's not exactly formal, people just create.

Have you taken part on a crowdsourcing project?

No.

Would you be interested in taking part in the future?

Yes I would.

In what field would you be interested in taking part of, according to your professional skills or hobbies?

Em.. I'm quite interested in medical devices, and I would like to have more information and money from other people to invest in one.

Would you do it for the financial benefit or for the value that you create with your work?

Em..I'd say financial benefit is quite important for any kind of work.

Would you do it as a part time job or a full time one, considering that payment can be less, but tasks are more specific and can take less time to complete?

I would do it as a part time job.

Sometimes employers might not be happy with your work, and ask you to redo it or correct the mistakes. What would your response to that be?I will correct the mistake and try to find a better solution. It was my decision to do it, so even if I'm not getting paid as much, I still want to improve it. I don't like mistakes.

Would you be open to implement a crowdsourcing project or competition for a problem that you are facing? Do you recognise the power of the crowd?

Yes, because I will not be able to know the actual solution by myself, and if I can get advice from others, it broaden my perspective. I think I would get a better solution when there is a big crowd to answer it.

Will you take part in a project where you are not confident in the skills they ask for?

No, because I would not do my best, as it's not my area of expertise. So I might make mistakes if I'm not confident.

Will you financially support a project that you like, or believe in?

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Yes, if I have money at that moment haha. I would prefer to give small amounts thou because I'm not quite sure of its success. And if I give money to a whole project and it failed, I think it has high risk.

Do you think companies should listen more to their customers when developing a new product or service, and why??

Because the customer is the main target for a company to develop a product, and they should consider consumers to be the most important factor.


In high-technology products, because you need to put a high investment on such products, so if you fail, then you will also lose a lot of money. For example a medical device.

If the motivational factors are insufficient, will you still give the solution to the best of you knowledge? For example if the payment is not satisfactory.

Yes, if I believe in the success of the project, sure.

If a competitor company would approach you with the intention of a malicious attack against the company issuing the project, what would be your response?

I will refuse them.

Even if there is a high payment for it?

Yes, because it is not ethical to do it.

If you make a breakthrough discovery or innovate something of great commercial value, will you ask for its intellectual property?

Well from what I know, if you are working under a project, then whatever you make will remain in the company. You cannot ask for it because it is in the contract.

Ok, but sometimes you don't work under a contract. Workers are freelancers.

In that case I will ask for it. But if they can't give it to me, then it would be fine.

Projects generally imply collaborating with the other participants, while competing for the same price. What is your view on that?

Emm.. I think it's good to be challenging in this way. Because before you take part in a project, you need to accept the terms. Plus I think it's quite common. It can also be bad because it's not your whole idea, you're building on the other's ideas to provide the best solution.


Yes!

Will you work pro-bono as a volunteer for a project that you support the cause?

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Yes, if it's really interesting then ok. But I would rather ask for money first.

If you identify misbehaviour between other participants, will you take the action of reporting it? And why?

I think I would just let it go, because it would not affect me directly.

But indirectly it might affect the whole project, you know, it can at least slow it down.

Mmm... I would talk to the person first in this case because maybe they did not intend to do that. If it persists I would definitely turn to the management with this issue.


Are you familiar with any crowdsourcing practices or project?

Actually there is a movie in the Indian film industry where they have done crowdsourcing. The name is Lucia. I also know about P&G but I can't remember what is it they crowdsourced for.

Have you ever taken part in a crowdsourcing project?

No.

Would you be interested in taking part in the future?

Yes why not.

In what industry are you interested in taking part of, according to your professional skills or hobbies?

Emm if I had the chance to contribute in crowdsourcing I would prefer the food and beverage industry.

Would you do it for the financial benefit, or for creating something of real value and having your voice herd?

As of now I'm young and I just wanna get a platform to put across my ideas. But my main priority will not be money.

Would you do it as a part-time or full-time job, considering payment can be less, but tasks are more specific and can take less time to complete.

If that's the case I would do it part time. Because if the payment is not according to the task, then there's no point in devoting too much time for it, but at the end of the day I would like to contribute to adding the value, so I would like to associate with it. Although part-time would be enough for it.

Sometimes, the employer might not be happy with your work, and ask you to remake it or take care of the mistakes. Would you be tempted to take care of the problem or abort the project?

I would like to devote 100% in correcting it if necessary.

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Would you be open to implement a crowdsourcing project or competition for a problem that you are facing? It can be an individual problem, or a corporate project.

Given the chance I would choose crowdsourcing to correct my problem if there's any.

Anything specific in mind?

Emm well right now I'm looking to start a business in the UK or if I go back to India, so I would not ask for the investment, but how to generate more capital, asking for ideas in those kind of issues that I might face.

Will you take part in a project or competition where you are not completely confident in the skills they ask for?

Yes I would try my hand absolutely, and it's something new which I can learn in the long-run. I wouldn't want to let go of the opportunity.


Yes, I would put my resources in it if I believe in it.

What is the maximum sum that you would contribute with?

The maximum would be around £400 if we're talking about a project, but if it's a business then I would probably go up to £5,000.

Do you think companies should listen more to their customers when developing a new product or service?

Yes definitely because the customers are the final goal that the company has to reach, so they are the most important.


I would like to see the food and beverage industry profit from it. Because they are the common essentials of a man, however poor or rich he is, he has to invest in food and beverage to survive. So whatever inflation, or economic situation that a country may have, he has to invest on these. So I don't think this industry will go down.

If the motivational factors such as monetary rewards are insufficient, will you still give the solution to the best of your knowledge?

Yes! If I choose to be part of it from the first time, then yes it wouldn't matter. Especially if it has a good prospect, I will give all I have. Monetary reward is not the most important.

If a competitor company would approach you with the intention of a malicious attack against the company issuing your project, what would be your response? This relates to giving the wrong answers or any action that could potentially undermine the project.

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I would say no... This is quite hard to tell, but I wouldn't like to put something down for my own good. If I would take the money, I wouldn't feel good with the money, so it would be best to not take that money.

If you make a breakthrough discovery or innovate something of great commercial value while under the norms of the project, will you ask for it's IP?

Yes I would.

Are you aware that in most cases it would belong to the crowdsourcerer?

I would still ask my fair share from the thing that I have done.

Projects generally imply collaborating with other participants, while competing on the same time for the same price. What is your view on that? Is it beneficial or detrimental?

It's good to have some competition , then you can think out of the box and think differently from the others. If there's no competition then that zeal will not be there in the market, or in the business.


Yes!

Do you see it as just beneficial for increasing your skills or just giving a better prospect on your CV?

No, at the end of the day I want to improve my skills so on the long-term if I plan on starting a business it would be helpful for me, it would be like a training.

Would you work pro-bono, volunteer for a project that you support the cause?

Yea as I told you if I get involved in crowdsourcing, volunteering to work for free would be the first thing, but for a while, for the knowledge sake I wouldn't mind.

If you identify misbehaviour between other participants, would you take the action of reporting it? And why?

Yes I prefer a good environment to work in, and corwdsourcing is all about interacting with each other and this means good relationships and similar vision, and if it's not a supporting environment that there's no point in going about it. I would report it.

Anything you'd like to add?

Yes it is a very challenging because each person will have its own ideas and own thinking and they will all look good at the first instance when they'll come out. But we have to make sure that ideas is suited for that particular thing or not. It is a challenge to choose which is the best. All will sound best, all will look best, but choosing the right one will be a difficult task.


Are you aware of any crowdsourcig practices? Can you name a few?

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I think first time I came across it was when I started my internship. I talked with my boss because I was looking for a job opportunity different to what I was doing.

Yeah. Like freelance? You were actually basically you were going in a freelance, freelancing uhm opportunity or what was it?

No no. He... for some reason he… was suggesting this crowdfunding because aaaa yes yes because uhm I was I wanted to try to introduce one sport in the Czech republic, is called Padel, I don’t know if you know it.

Padel? I don't know ...

Well the thing is it’s a very popular sport in Spain. Uhm … I … I was thinking of introducing it in the Czech Republic.

Aright.

You can’t imagine how popular it is. So he was suggesting this … crowdfunding method and I … I … checked it out. I started to find some information and so on.

But this is … you didn’t… what I’m researching is not crowdfunding, it is crowdsourcing. Crowdfunding is actually part of crowdsourcing, you know? Like crowdsourcing is basically when a company has a problem, it can either make a competition or emm just issue the problem online for a community to answer, you know? Like it’s not going to employ a full time worker, it’s going to employ basically freelancers to get the job done, you know? The crowd.

Yeah. Emm ...

That’s what it is basically. So you can have projects like in design or like in architecture, or like even if you can make a business study, a case study on a problem and solve it, and you’re gonna get less payment than a full time job, but still enough you know to motivate you to take part. So basically it’s issuing a problem to the crowd through the internet. So if you have a problem, it’s you and a number of other people are going to try and solve it. The one that gets it done in the right way will win the price. But sometimes it’s for free in case of volunteering.

So did you take part in any crowdsourcing project?

No I haven't.

But will you be interested in the future?

I guess so.

Alright. What did you want to say? I interrupted you.

Yeah. There is one political party in Spain …Eee… it’s called podemus. Podremus is aaa ... it’s rising now, it’s very popular now… so the thing is is that the corruption in the nine, in the too many political parties in Spain. Uhm everybody is elected them. So they want to put them all in jail and so on. Because all of them are corrupted. And this one political party is new and it arose through crowdfunding. Its financiation? ... financing yeah, was exclusively from the crowd. And now it's very very popular and it's

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probably going to make aaa huge result in next selections. Actually it did it already in the European elections.

How do you know about this? It's a Spanish project?

It's a Spanish political party. Everything is... every expense is covered by crowdfunding. And well they were introducing the tv in some debates aaand they are really popular.

Nice, but this is again crowdfunding. It's a bit off topic. You know for you to understand better, like Apple does with it's Apple store, emm for example it says ok we don't have any fitness apps for example. Let's make a contest, see a number of different examples, pick the winning one and give a price to the developer.

So you said you would take part in a project for the future?

Yes, if there is a good chance, I will consider it of course.

Would you do it for the financial benefits, or the real value of your work and the chance to create something of meaning that will be recognised and have your voice herd in the company?

Emm I don't think I'm really qualified to even think of the second one... because I would say such a thing is more for ... if I want to develop an idea, or to develop something, me myself as an economist or an accountant or something like that, I don't really think that I could do anything for my own career in ... I would be just interested in money. It is targeted you know?

Not necessarily, that's why it's an open call. But tasks can be more focused you know? So you can have small tasks and for example, just make or verify a balance sheet and win 5 dollars. So focused, and takes a lot less time for each participant, you know?

Yes but what I mean is ... in that case, I wouldn't to be able to write in my CV ok I earned 1,000 euros from doing crowdsourcing. I would not do it in such...

No, you can say I was part of a successful crowdsourcing project, and I contributed with this or that.

Yea but I don't think I would do it for that.

Yeah, most people I guess are motivated by the financial incentive. So would you do it in a part time job, or full time, considering that payment can be less and emm but as I told you, tasks are more specific and take less time to complete.

Well if I ... I guess I would start like part time job, and then if I saw a really big thing in there, I would consider taking it as something serious, but... at the beginning I would just consider it some extra money probably.

Well most people work like that, doing a full time job, and participating in crowdsourced projects based on their skills or hobbies in their free time. Emm sometimes, the employer might not be happy with your work and ask you to redo it, or correct the mistakes you know? Would you be tempted to take care of the problem, or just abort the project?

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Well I think that in my case I would do it again. Not because of the money, just because of self emmm esteem, you know?

Yes, and to get the employer obviously happy.

Yes, it's my work you know? If I do something, I do it correctly, because it's my name on the line.

Would you be open to implement a crowdsourcing project by yourself as an individual for a problem that you might face? Do you recognise the power of the crowd to solve any problem?

Why not? Yeah, but I think that emm there should be a good enough platform.

Oh there are plenty of platforms. Did you ever herd of Kickstarter?

Yes, my boss was actually proposing Kickstarter.

And the crowdfunding is actually part of crowdsourcing.

Exactly, yeah I remember that when I first clicked on Kickstarter, there were two different sides of the web page at least, as they were saying one or the other, and I just clicked on the crowdfunding. But I didn't read about the other one.

Ok. Next question is will you take part in a project where you are not confident in the skills that it asks for? Just doing it for trying your hand.

Pff well I guess that... if there was no penalty about it, why not.

There is no penalty, and sometimes there isn't even a binding contract.

Yea but I mean... I don't really mean a penalty, but if it's not harmful for the company, because if they only take one guy to do it, or everyone can do it?

Everyone is invited to do it.

So if there is no harm, than I can just upload my work, they will revise it and if it is not correct, then they can take some other guy's work? Yea why not?!

You know most of the times it builds organically, like if you submit something, everyone on the platform can see it, and it can correct it. It doesn't have to be the employer, it can be the community that perfects your answer. So will you be willing to financially support a project that you like or believe in?

If I would be willing to crowdfund something? Yes that's a difficult question because actually there are some really interesting things there, but it's always difficult to get involved. It's always difficult to make that step.

Yes, but you can get involved just by taking part with as little as you can.

You can give them 5 10 20 euros or whatever and ... but it's always kind of the big step. So the problem is that the platform to do it, it always fells a little bit unsafe because even though you can see the domain of

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the webpages which is like safe, you know? And you can see the logos and whatever. You always feel a little bit lazy to take your card, write your number and so on...

But maybe you really like, or believe it. It can be something that is perfecting windsurfing for example.

Yea but I still don't see myself doing it. For example I saw this solar roadways, dunno if you know it?

Yea it's a really good project.

Yea and I really believe it's possible but, and I want it to be real. But at the same time you start thinking, and you say ok, it needs like 6 millions of me doing this deposit ... soo everybody at the same time has to do it, otherwise it will fail.

Yes that's the tricky part. It has to raise all its capital on most of the platforms. But you as the participant will get the money back if the project fails.

Really? Well I don't think that everybody knows it.

Yeah well... Ok, do you think companies should listen to their customers more when developing a new product or service?

Maybe, depends.

I'm trying to raise the question of whether you would like you voice to have an impact on the company? If it's something that interests you, for example an upgrade on your iMac, then Apple will ask everyone for their opinion on how to make it better. Because even your opinion counts as crowdsourcing.

Well in some sense it's always nice to feel that your opinion is important, but on the other hand when all these surveys come and so on, you feel lazy to fill them.

I see. But it can come in any form, like through your social media.

Most of the time still is quite annoying, because you have to introduce maybe your email and then you have to write some data and you end up not doing it.

Haha. Ok, this is an important question. In which specific industry do you consider crowdsourcing should be implemented more aggressively?

Well I guess it's all about science in any... not economic science of course, no just science. People nowadays all the knowledge is in the wrong industries. It's in football, music and all that nonsense. So if we really care about really important things, maybe it's our ability to take care of them being done.

What about if the motivational factors are insufficient, will you still give the solution to the best of your knowledge? For example you'll not get emm enough payment as you'd wish or you made a project, and then another company comes with the same issue, but paying less for the task. Or would you just treat it with less seriousness?

Emmm it's all about the effort right?

Exactly, and your intention to do a good job, even if payment is much less.

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Well I guess in the beginning I will do my best, but in the end, and if it happens very often I would just relax.

Aright. So financial emm motivation is quite important.

Yes.

If a competitor company would approach you with the intention of a malicious attack against the company issuing the project, what would your response be?

To feel attached to the company or?

No no, malicious attack...

I mean this is about the...

For example a competitor might come and give you this much money just to give the wrong answers.

Yes, so it's about loyalty. So I wouldn't do that, I would be honest to the company.

Ok. If you make a breakthrough discovery or innovate something of great commercial value, while under the norms of the project, will you ask for its intellectual property?Of course.

Projects generally imply collaborating with the other participants, while in the same time you compete against each other, you know? For the price of the competition. What is your view on that? Because there might be an effect called too many chefs in the kitchen, you know?

Yes, that's not really easy.

It's trying to imply the more heads, the better the solution.

Yes but in the same time you have to divide. The more heads, the more you have to divide the price.

Oh no, the price goes to the winning participant.

But if you worked with some people ... I mean are you working in teams, or?

You are working as an individual. But the project is done by the whole community. You can take part with one task at a time, but you are competing with the others that do the same task as you.

In that case, I guess I wouldn't really work. Because you can always try to help, but then maybe even lie.

But if you can't make it on your own, you might need their help.

If you can't make it on your own, you will not be able to fight for the price. You are not good enough, so just move to another task...

Ok, just think of the fact that the company might not know the answer to some problems. They might have already tried with their entire R&D team, so that's why they outsource it to all individuals around the

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world. The idea is to build on top of each other's work, you know?But everyone is making their own part, so in the end there is only one guy who gets the price. So I wouldn't really help you. I wouldn't want to help you. I would only help someone if I am working on task A and them on task B. And probably the other way around. But I ask the whole community, I just don't think that anybody from task A would answer, you know? Because they don't want somebody to be closer to the right answer.

So do you see this activity attractive for enriching your CV?

If it was a big company maybe, but...

Ok. Will you work pro-bono on a project that you support the cause?

Probably, actually definitely but with small tasks. And I would rather work for free than giving them my money.

Ok, last question. If you identify misbehaviour between other participants, will you take the action of reporting it? And why?

Yes of course. For two reasons. One is that I would keep some confidence, plus there would be less people to fight for the price. At the same time, morally I would feel quite better doing the right thing.


Are you aware of any crowdsourcing practices? If yes, name a few.

I guess the thing I told you about, like kickstarter, where the game developers actually get people to correspond their project, and they actually get them involved in the development, ask them about certain features and so on. There's actually another one I just read about today, like a game called ... have you herd of Unreal Tournament? They're like the newest one, they actually develop emm partly with the help of players, so I don't know, they actually get people to do stuff like 3D models and such as well.

Have you even taken part in any crowdsourcing project?

No.

Would you be interested in the future?

Emm yea sure.

In what field would you be interested in taking part of according to your professional skills or hobbies?

I guess stuff like I don't mind modeling or anything game involved. But basically stuff that I'm doing now like 3D modelling, texturing emm...

Would you work for the financial benefit, or for the real value of your work and the chance to create something of meaning that will be recognised and have your voice herd in the company?

Emm yeah I guess I wouldn't mind working on something even though I don't get paid, but obviously I wouldn't be able to put as much time in time, maybe I'll be able to spend couple of hours on the

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weekend... like if it's a hobby project from people who don't have money but they just want to make a game. If I actually felt like the project was pretty cool.

But if you have a financial motivation, you'll basically put more time and more effort to it, depending on the project.

Well obviously I need some money to live, and if I wouldn't have a proper job I wouldn't mind doing something like this.

Would you do it as a part-time job or a full-time job, considering that payment can be less, but tasks are more specific and can take less time to complete?

Well it depends on how secure it is in terms of the financial. I don't know, I guess there are actually people who live for freelancing, but in the beginning it's very hard to actually get jobs.

But if you do it part-time, then you can do a number of small tasks in a small period of time.

As long as it's couple of hours per weekend, I wouldn't mind part-time.

Sometimes, the employer might not be happy with the work done, so he might ask you to redo it or correct some mistakes. Would you be tempted to take care of the problem, or just abort the project?

It depends again if I'm getting paid, then I would probably be more likely to actually redo it. But if there's no payment... especially if I think it would be fine, but some who's not even paying me is telling me oh no you have to do it again... well like I probably won't do it (laughs). But that's only the case if it would be unreasonable.

Would you be open to implement a crowdsourcing project as an individual to solve a problem that you're facing? Do you recognise the power of the crowd?

Obviously there's a lot of benefits... like certainly in games development, the people playing the game can basically tell you what they want, and then if you do it, they would probably buy it. For example in a technical problem... like in a forum, the wide public probably won't be able to help you with the technical problem because most people don't know.

Not necessarily. Do you know YahooAnswers? It's also a crowdsourcing platform, and it's nothing more than a forum. So anyone can answer any kind of question.

Yes I guess so.

Will you take part in a project where you are not entirely confident of the skills that they ask for?

Emm it depends, if you get paid there's a certain expectation, but if I'm working for free then yea sure, why not? I'll just improve my skills.


Yes, well that's pretty much what kickstarter is, right?

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Yes it's a crowdfunding platform. Do you think companies should listen to their clients more when developing a product or service?

It's always a good idea I guess.


I guess certainly stuff like you use every day, like for example mobile phones, for the operating systems or whatever. I mean I guess they already to a lot of this stuff so... but basically yeah, in telecommunication. I mean everything that emm involves some kind of interface, so technology for the most part, because I guess that's the field you can do the most to make something customer friendly.

If the motivational factors are insufficient, will you still give the solution to the best of your knowledge? For example if money is not enough.

Well in reality I would probably get demotivated. Depends on how much I believe in the project, but I'd say probably the money isn't the main incentive.

If a competitor company would approach you with the intention of a malicious attack against the company issuing the project, what would be your response?

Well that's a moral question (laughs). I wouldn't.

If you make a breakthrough discovery or innovate something of great commercial value while under the norms of the project, will you ask for its intellectual property?

Probably.

Are you aware that companies will not give you the IP?

I guess so yeah...

Ok projects generally imply collaborating with the other participants while competing for the same price in the same time. What's your view on that?

I don't know, in some ways competition is a good thing, so you actually give your best and all... but it depends on the environment really if it gets too competitive... you know you have someone standing behind you telling you what you should do. I guess like a good example would be obviously in university... I mean we're studying the same thing, but at some point you have to be competing for jobs... the way I found it depends on the people, most people I worked with we helped each other even though we knew at some point we'll be competing for jobs. So collaboration is good.

Do you see this activity attractive to enrich your CV?

Emm yeah well again in the games industry it's one thing to have your portfolio to just have professional work on there, but most companies they will want to see that you have passion beyond your job, so some work did on your free time is quite important and very good. It doesn't have to be very polished, but showing that you like what you're doing and you're not doing it just for the money is a big plus.

Would you work for free, like volunteer for a project that you support its cause?

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Yes, but again in certain restrictions like 6 hours a weekend let's say, maybe more.

If you identify misbehaviour between other participants, will you take the action of reporting it? And why?

Emm I don't know, can you give an example of what that might be?

Like giving the wrong answers, confusing the other participants or giving irrelevant answers... spamming.

I guess I'd prefer to actually speak to the person first. If that won't work than yes I'd report it.



Wikipedia is one. Also, there's a lot of websites. There's Kickstarter, Indigogo...


No, no particular projects. Wikipedia.

Yeah. But would you be interested in the future to take part in projects in a more business-like environment?

Yes, it's good for ideas. Competition can thrive in all kinds of projects. It's good for small, medium enterprises, or for Indian entrepreneurs. It's a great way to help, or basically to start your business.

3. And in what field are you interested in taking part of according to your professional skills or hobbies?

Mmmm.... I don't know. Maybe give them some ideas about design or maybe on how to market.

4. Would you do it for the financial benefit or for the real value of your work and for the chance of creating something of meaning that would be recognized and have your voice heard?

I think it wouldn't be for financial purposes, more like a hobby, to make a difference or make a point.

5. Would you do it as a part time job or as a full time one ....

Part time.

Considering that payment can be less, but tasks are more specific and take less time to complete?

Maybe I'd do it full time and start my own business. But it would probably be a small thing, which I don't really need help for. Maybe I need a little help in design.

This is the perspective of you as a crowdworker.

Like if I do it ... I wouldn't be in it for financial purposes. But I would do it part time because it's not gonna be for financial gain. More like sharing a point, or a belief.

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I would take care of it.


Not particularly, no. But I know, in the future, when I go back to my home country, to India, it's really beneficial. Because all the projects ... there's a lot of information that's available right now. And instead of getting experts I'd rather ask everyone whether they can help.


Yeah. I mean I wouldn't mind trying.

Yeah. You might try your hand, even win the competition or just learn something from it.

Yeah, sure, why not?


Yeah. Right now I can definitely go up to 1000 Pounds. I would actually rather invest 1000 Pounds per project.

10. Do you think companies should listen to their customers more when developing a new product or service?

Yes. Because everything needs to be attractive and appealing to the customers. Everything needs to be designed according to the customers because of the competition.


Ummm.... I don't know. Could be art maybe, could be technology, could be applied to medical advancement, designing. When there's particular companies and particular industries. We cannot focus only on the engineers and their expertise. Once you do crowdsourcing, there's more expertise, you know? It can make a difference. Especially technology makers. There are all kinds of reforms that are gonna come in time.


Yeah. Once you're doing it... I think people do it because they really wanna do it. And many, if they really want to do it, are motivated enough to give 100%. So I think monetary won't make a big difference. Although some are doing it full time. Then maybe it's gonna make a difference.


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I wouldn't do it. That's particularly wrong. If someone's trying to make a difference, why try to stop them? So...


Yeah, I would ask for it, but I would give it for free though. Even if it's a great innovation, you know?


It's not gonna be for me, it's gonna be for the community. For everyone. If I'm thinking crowdsourcing, it's not gonna be just for me. It'd be an open act.


I'm sure it's beneficial in motivating a lot of people.

Just for motivating, yeah?

Yeah. I think motivation... that's the main thing. Otherwise they're not gonna help out, if there's not much to choose from.

If there's no competition? Or if there's no collaboration? Or both?

I think competition is good. I think competition is the best point of view. You try more and more. You don't set out on just choosing one, you go for the best. But too much competition is also bad, you know? People can start withdrawing from their competition. But when there's helping competition, it's always good.


Mmmm... Yeah, I mean it can help.

Even if you didn't get the big prize? Just showing your interest?

Yeah, I'm sure it could really help. I think companies look forward to all this. It's not about money. It's about initiative, how much you're doing it by yourself.


Yeah, for sure. I would volunteer.

And work for free?

Yeah, for free. I would be so excited. You're even doing it something for you. But if it's completely free free, I wouldn't give it my full time but I would definitely volunteer.


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Mmmm... Depends on the issue. If it's very bad then I would definitely report it. But if it's not that bad, I won't really care.

What if there are small things from a lot of people though?

Umm... I would just make it work, you know? I don't know. Not really sure. I may report it, may not report it. It depends on the situation.

If you feel affected, obviously. If you feel affected by it.

Yeah, if I feel affected I'm gonna do something about it. Either I'm gonna confront those guys about it or I'm gonna report it. Like whatever solves the issue, I would do that. If it's making me feel uncomfortable.


Well, outsourcing is beneficial. Like for example I believe in some cause and people can reach out for the same cause and it’s going to be beneficial. If I have other people who believe in the project, that will just make it strong. But even for outsourcing, I need to reach out to the right kind of people.

Yeah, identifying the right solver is hard. It’s a challenge.

Yeah, it’s a challenge. But once you reach that kind of people, I think outsourcing works really well. It’s actually an amazing way to start something.



What do you mean by practices?

Like platforms, or projects, or ... anything.

Ummm..... I'm aware of some companies that provide crowdfunding but I don't know any project. I mean I don't know about money.

No, it's about crowdsourcing, not crowdfunding.

Explain to me again.

Crowdsourcing is when a company is trying to make use of workers' knowledge or expertise, basically using the power of the crowd to solve an issue.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I know. When I worked for Deloitte, they had to develop kind of a new name, a new brand for its product for Peru. And they like called in on people from different departments and did a kind of a brainstorming on how to motivate people, for the brand.

How to rebrand, or what?

No, no. It's like make a new name for the product. So they got together and like came up with cool names for the product.

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I see.


No, man, I didn't. But I would be interested. Yeah. Mostly yes.And in what field are you interested in taking part of according to your professional skills or hobbies?

I guess I'd like it when people get together and try to develop video games and features for video games and stuff like that.


Well, I think I can have both. But if I have to choose one of them, then I think the second one is for me, its better. Financial benefits are less important. Doesn't mean they're not important though.


Well, you know, I've never taken part in this and I don't know how interesting it is. So I'm not sure. Once I'd do it as a part time job, but I'm not sure. Put in part time job.


Well yeah, I will take care of the problem. I will try to correct the problem. If I make a mistake, then of course it's my responsibility to correct that mistake.

It's not just about correcting the mistake. You might do it to the best of your knowledge but maybe the employer wants a slight adjustment.

Yeah. I mean... I will. I will try my best to ... make it... yeah.


Yeah, I guess. There is like... different background and experience that they have.

It's not just the knowledge and it's not just the opinion of the crowd. They can bring expertise, they can bring technology.

Yes exactly.

So the answer's yes?

Yeah.


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Hmmm.... It depends on what cause it's involved. I mean, if it doesn't involve much cause ...

No, it can be a simple task. Like a company asks to translate a text from Chinese or German to English. So you know maybe both languages, but maybe you don't know how to work in Microsoft Word. So you aren't confident. But would you still do it?

Yeah, yeah, I will.

It's just an example, you know, for you to get the idea.

Yeah, I know.


Yeah. It depends on the cause of the project. But mostly yeah. It depends on my financial capability. Mostly yes. If I really like it, I will try to kind of support it. But, you know, you cannot have that kind of money. If they couldn't find it anywhere then... of course any penny counts.


Yeah, I definitely think so. For example, if the thing is not satisfactory ... you know, these products they keep like coming out... they just ... have people complaining about this stuff or that stuff. It doesn't reach the developing companies. You know, that kind of thing.


Ummm..... The gaming industry. Or in things that have to do with PCs, high-tech, that kind of stuff.

Why this though? I mean, maybe like medical devices...

No, it's just because it's about the mass customer, you know? So a lot of people have the mechanism ideas from your customer, to put their opinion into your product, you know? Kind of like satisfy most of the people.


Yeah, well, it's just that if you are not motivated to do something it's just ... really hard to... do stuff.

It's basically asking about the financial motivation.

It is true that the cost is truly something meaningful, but if it's that can change things, even if it's not something they like, they will try to do it.

So again, the financial motivation is less than the value you create.

Yeah.

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Umm...

Do you understand what "malicious attack" means?

Umm... yeah...I don't know how to answer, to be honest. I will try to defend that project from the attack, I guess.

No, it's not about what you guess or not. What would you do? Maybe they can offer you like 1000 bucks, Pounds, whatever, just to give the wrong solution to the problem that you're facing.

Nooo. I'm not going to do that.

Why? Is it because of the morals?

Yeah, it's morals. It's also about the person. You want money or you want meaning? So if I'm in the project it means that I like its meaning, right?


Yeah. Yes. If I had a big part in creating that project then it is my right to have the intellectual property.


(Laugh) Yeah. I know. I'd try it again, the property. I will try. I know how hard it is but....

So you think that as long as it's mostly your knowledge and it has great commercial value, it's not the company who should be benefiting from it, it's you.

Ummm.... I mean they put a lot of money in it. Then.... yeah... I'm not sure, man. If they put a lot of money in the project, I don't know about that. Yeah, this needs to be discussed, man.


Money is something that you really have to put in. It's just really hard for me to say it now. I wouldn't try to cheat, or something like that.

No, no. It's trying to say that you need to compete against each other but also build on top of each other's knowledge to get to the solution in the end. So what is your view on that? You think it's beneficial or not? You think you'd be distracted or forced out of the competition if another...

That's not happening. That's not happening. If a lot of people compete on just one prize, then it might happen that someone wants to force some money out of the competition.

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It's about you, not someone else, so... What would you do in the situation? Not what you'd do. Basically, what is your view on it? Is it good for the company and for the project? Or is it bad? Should it be just collaboration with no prize?

I think it can be like a common prize. Is it possible? Like... kind of a team. You get the prize, you share it with your team-mates. So like sharing the prize.


Yeah, I'd acknowledge it for my CV if I take part in a successful project.


Yeah, of course, yeah.


I'd mostly talk to the guys, discuss, try to get them to come on the right track. If they don't listen then yeah, I'd put in a report to the management.

Is there anything that you would like to add?No.



Yes, I’ve heard of it approximately 4 years ago. Friends of mine at the time were being hired/engaged in freelancing projects such as web sites, web applications etc.


Erm.. not particularly. I mean, I was helping a friend of mine who was actually involved in the project. I believe it was about two years ago for a web-based application required by a transport company. Regarding your second question, yes, i will be interested in the future to take part of a crowdsourcing project because that obviously will allow me to apply my skills and knowledge to literally unlimited amount of different and interesting projects.


As a considerably recent graduate in software engineering and current employee at an online business as a developer, any project representing a software problem/challenge will be suitable for me. To be more specific, I reckon that websites(both front-end and back-end), desktop and web-based apps, database development/management and others should be alright, you know.


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Well, honestly that is hard to answer. Obviously, everyone wants to feel the satisfaction of what one’s doing. However, on the other hand the world we are living in, in most cases requires from you to do what you have to do in order to provide for yourself and any others dependant on you. So, long story short, I would love to have the chance to be part of something meaningful and interesting as long as it doesn’t confront my priorities.


I have been considering this issue for a while and I came to the conclusion that I need to be far more experienced than I am at the moment. Once I decide to choose which projects I will work on, I want to be secured enough that I can overcome most of the challenges. The shorter version of all above - as a full time job I think it could be a quite financially beneficial as it would allow me to focus on the particular project as long as it takes.

Sometimes the employer might not be happy with your work and ask you to redo it, or just correct the mistakes. Would you be tempted to take care of the problem, or abort the project?Well, of course I would do my best to deliver what I was asked. Regarding my experience in the industry, I have faced situations where the client changes his/her mind drastically at the very due date of it. That is where the contracts and pre-contracts take place. But in the area such as the crowdsourcing I suppose things stay in a different way i.e. you are getting paid the money you were offered only in case the client is satisfied with the final product. Correct it me if I am wrong, but this is how I see it. So, if I have to put myself on that place my answer is affirmative, I would do my best to solve the particular problem.


Yeah, I guess so. Let’s say I have a business of online shop of any kind. Let’s assume I think or I was recommended that the brand of my online-shop needs to be renovated. I would definately go for a crowdsourcing project which will engage many different people with a particular task. That way I am solving a problem by paying considerably less money compared to a design agency and furthermore talented individuals receive a fair wage for their skills.


As part of my current job, I am facing similar issues on daily basis. After all, that is the so called positive adrenaline of the job - completing something that you thought would be out of your knowledge/skills at the beginning. So, yeah, definitely I would go for it and will smash it by delivering top quality (hehe).

Will you be willing to financially support a project you like or believe in? What is your maximum? Erm… Obviously if I had the finances to do it, I will do it. I could hardly say my maximum because it entirely depend on the type of the project.

Do you think companies should listen to their customers more when developing a new product or service? Haha, I would be extremely honest on this question - Yes and No. Yes, obviously due to the fact that the product is for the customers and big NO because if they knew exactly what they wanted, they wouldn’t be coming to seek your help, am I right ?

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In the fast-growing industries such the web, the design and similar to those. TO the question of why, the answer will be simply because today’s technologies allow many people to collaborate from all over the world and the ideas gathering is extremely fast. Respectively, quick and elegant solutions would appear easier.

If the motivational factors such as monetary rewards are insufficient, will you still give your solution to the best of your knowledge?

Yes i would. For good or bad, this is how i work. And I don’t mean that I am super perfectionist. Not at all actually. It is simply the fact that as long as I am not happy of the result of whatever I am doing, in term of functionality, I would simply not give up

If a competitor company would approach you with the intention of a malicious attack against the company issuing a project, what would be your response? This relates to payment to give the wrong answers and potentially undermining the project.A legal action against that competitive company seems as the most reasonable answer to me.


Absolutely yes! After all, it was your brain-power and creativity that came up with the particular solution. And I am not talking about the financial benefits of marking it as a intellectual property, but more like of the recognition for your success


Haha, unfortunately yes. It is the same as working as in working almost in every single company on elsewhere. Your employer is entitled to all the products or services that you deliver whilst working there. Therefore it makes sense to be the same as in the crowdsourcing projects.


Hmm, once you have agreed on the price and all that I see no reason why it could be detrimental. I mean, if we all work for the successful completion of the project, this implies we all want to do our best and get paid for the services provided


Yes, definitely, the very least thing it will show to your future employer is your flexibility and ability to cope with different problems etc.


Yes, I would. Sometimes, when you know that that idea behind the project is something far greater than financial benefits, e.g. charity project or something like that, it kind of feels natural to take part in it.

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As soon as it starts to interfere with the project deadlines and goals, that would be the first thing to do. Obviously, a step backwards will be also a good idea - trying to investigate the reason for the misbehaviour/conflict itself.


First of all, thanks for the question, they are indeed quite intriguing. In regards of the crowdsourcing itself, I do believe it has a bright future and a lot of further development. As I answered on some the questions above, I would love to welcome the opportunity to take part of some of those projects and why not do that as a full-time job.

Appendix 14. Confidentiality and anonymity granted

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