What Can Companies Expect from Crowd Funding and Crowd Sourcing?

[SOURCE] Crowds gathered in a Mall in UK.

Originally posted at SAPHANA.com.

Whenever new Internet-based business models are invented, some quickly create new kinds of companies – like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter.  Others mature more slowly such as in the case of crowd funding and crowd sourcing. Crowd funding is finding funding for projects, products and companies from strangers on the Internet with companies such as Kickstarter, IndieGogo, and AngelList helping crowd funding mature. Crowd sourcing is sourcing work or creative ideas from strangers on the Internet with companies such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and 99 Designs successfully showing different models of crowd sourcing.  These concepts have been around since the beginning of Web 2.0, but enterprises are still trying to understand how these might fit into their existing businesses.

Having been involved with SAP’s first crowd sourcing programs, the SAP HANA Idea Incubator, and the SAP Idea Place, I’ve run firsthand into the many different expectations that people have about these concepts. Most understand some of the benefits they might receive, but not the corresponding duties they have to making their project a success. Similarly, I think involving a crowd has some far reaching benefits that only some have set up their campaigns to fully realize.

 

Labor is Obsolete

“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.”

St. Francis of Assisi

Labor as we knew it is obsolete. It has been for a while. Sure, vestiges of its greatness still exist in certain sectors, especially in civil service. We all still enjoy many of the workforce customs and regulations that organized labor helped put into place – people-friendly perks governing how employers treat workers. But the sway Labor enjoyed from the 1950’s until the 1980’s has lapsed.

Female workers in an H. J. Heinz can factory stamping out end discs (the discs that fit on either end of each can).
[SOURCE] Public domain.

The Social Impact of Big Data – Seven Amazing Takeaways from Skoll World Forum

While researching for a forthcoming blog I’m writing about applications of “Big Data” for social entrepreneurs, I ran across this amazing blog series by the Skoll World Forum called “How Can Big Data Have a Social Impact.”

The insights shared in this series are worth any business person’s time to read, as they show how typical problems with big data we face in industry are exacerbated when trying to solve the world’s hardest problems. Also fascinating is how the convergence of big data disciplines with cloud, mobile, and social technologies creates amazing solutions – but only when it improves the human condition.

“Big Data” has the power to improve the human condition or dehumanize and create inhumane conditions.
[SOURCE] © 2011 Thierry Gregorius, used according to Creative Commons License.

Expecting More From Business — Common Wealth Contributions By Business (Part 2)

Part II of my guest blog at the SAP Business Innovations for Sustainability blog…

This blog is a follow up to my prior blog Expecting More From Business — Common Wealth Contributions By Business (Part 1) where I discuss the book Betterness: Economics for Humans, by Umair Haque as a new standard for how we measure the contributions of business to society.

In this second part, my I want to investigate how well this framework can inspire thinking for “betterness” by evaluating common wealth contributions of a company I know well since I work for them, SAP. Let me be clear that these are my own opinions, and I do not speak for SAP nor any of the programs described, other than the one I directly support for marketing, SAP HANA One.

First we look at indicators whether a company’s management realizes it needs to do more – are they leveraging cause marketing, and are they reporting in sustainability and social responsibility. The second part of the framework examines direct contributions to the common wealth by operations and products.

Many companies are engaging in cause marketing because they know their customers want to feel like they are participating in something bigger than just being part of a market for a company trying to make a profit off of them. Sometimes this is just shallow “cause-washing” such as 10% of proceeds go to fund some charity, and sometimes it’s much more profound.

SAP has the challenge of many business-to-business companies. How do you explain the impact to the average person in the world of a company that sells enterprise business management software to over 250,000 other companies and institutions around the world? SAP does this by telling stories about the impact its customers are making through the use of this software. Often these are familiar consumer brand names that the public will know.  This helps position SAP’s impact as being much bigger than merely selling software.

Two examples of SAP’s brand marketing around “Helping the world run better”. Click images to see original sources. © SAP

Expecting More From Business — Common Wealth Contributions By Business (Part 1)

My guest blog originally posted to the SAP Business Innovations for Sustainability Blog…

Common Wealth Contributions By Business

Much to the annoyance of some past bosses, I have a habit of asking in meetings, “Why are we doing this, and what are we hoping to achieve?”

The economic turbulence of the last dozen years has led to me wondering the same thing about how we humans conduct our economic exchange. Asking the question, “what should we want to achieve in our economies, and how do we measure it?” eventually led me to the short book Betterness: Economics for Humans,  by Umair Haque.