Pico-Jobs as an Open Innovation Tool for Utilising Crowdsourcing

The Internet enables new forms of crowdsourcing by electronic platforms. Companies can use these platforms for opening up their innovation processes and for integrating customers by small, highly structured paid tasks. We call these tasks Pico-Jobs and illustrate them as an open innovation tool for systematically utilising the creative potential of customers for activities during the innovation process. The characteristics of Pico-Jobs are elaborated by reviewing leading crowdsourcing platforms and the Pico-Jobs offered on these platforms. Overall, companies can use Pico-Jobs for three different purposes: (1) Crowd Wisdom, which allows users of these crowdsourcing platforms to share their knowledge and perceptions with the company, (2) Crowd Creation, which encourages the creation of new content or artefacts on these platforms and (3) Crowd Voting, which involves platform users for the evaluation of product ideas, prototypes or designs. Our real-world case with OSRAM pinpoints these application patterns of Pico-Jobs and their potential for speeding up customer integration for generating and evaluating ideas for innovations.