Creativity is always in demand for businesses both large and small, but it doesn’t have to seem out-of-reach for the beginning start-up. From creating logos to websites to industrial designs, Chicago-based crowdSpring has provided a vast pool of creative talent all kinds of businesses since its launch in 2008.
First coined by Wired magazine journalist Jeff Howe in 2006, crowdsourcing has truly become a means of shaping how businesses conduct just that.
“The difference between outsourcing and crowdsourcing is in outsourcing, companies send projects and tasks to an outside party to complete. Crowdsourcing is more of an open call for services to a large distributed network of people – in our case, designers,” says crowdSpring’s co-founder Mike Samson.
crowdSpring, the Small Biz of 2008 award recipient by Wired, pools “about 100,000 ‘creatives’ from about 200 countries around the world,” is an online marketplace for creative services, Samson says. “We have roughly 35,000 buyers from about 100 countries, and posted closed to 25,000 projects since launching three years ago.”
Logo creation leads the pack with 60% in client requests, followed by web design. “We offer 43 different categories of services.”
So what’s the trend in crowdsourcing in big business vs. a small business? “Big businesses are still trying to figure it out, what it means to them in the overall ecosystem of sourcing services. They have a lot of choices in hiring. They can and will hire people to fit their needs."
"A smaller business – like a start-up – has limited time and budget, and might not be as sophisticated in the process of finding designers whose priced right, or finding a designer with a portfolio they might like, or even in verifying qualifications of work, etc. crowdSpring alleviates the business owner who’s trying to launch of all those things.”
The process goes like this: a buyer would post a project brief, stating their needs. Buyers determine the price, as well as the deadline, and would ultimately pick their favorite work. The artist of the chosen work would be paid through the Escrow online payment service. crowdSpring provides all the project management tools, contracts and payment service platforms.
Time and money would work in favor of the small business owner. “In brand identity, which typically costs from significantly well over $5,000 to $15,000, costs less than $1,000 using our services. We are a very fast way of sourcing work.” In the marketing industry, “what could take a month or more from concept to finish would only take 2-1/2 weeks, according to Samson.
Samson, an Emmy Award®-nominated producer, and production manager with more than 20 years of experience as a senior manager in the film and television production industry, was on-hand during Chicago’s Tech Week as a panelist during the event panel Future of Work: The Digital Worker.
Topics like enterprise productivity apps, knowledge management, and crowdsourcing to online user feedback were discussed, and how working in a company has become more collaborative and interactive than ever. Issues that compel companies to rethink work were the focus.
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