Accelerating Customer Integration into Innovation Processes using Pico Jobs

Crowdsourcing marketplaces emerged in the internet and enable the integration of customers in various tasks along the innovation process. Marketplaces such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk install a member base for third parties, where they can offer small, highly structured paid tasks which can hardly be solved automatically with information and communication technology (ICT) which we call Pico Jobs. In this paper, a new method for systematically utilising the creative potential of the users of these marketplaces for new product development is illustrated. First, an analysis of related work offers an overview of existing methods for integrating customers into innovation processes and classifies crowdsourcing marketplaces according to existing methods. Second, the characteristics of Pico Jobs are elaborated by reviewing leading crowdsourcing marketplaces. Third, our real-world case with OSRAM pinpoints the features of Pico Jobs for idea generation and validation such as the speed and the dynamic of involving customers into innovation processes. The article concludes with a discussion of potentials and limitations for companies applying Pico Jobs in order to accelerate the integration of customers. Overall, this article contributes a new concept for utilising crowdsourcing and points out opportunities for future research in this area.