Accelerating innovation through crowdsourcing: a case combining people and knowledge

Crowdsourcing has steadily proliferated across many disciplines and into new contexts as new industries embrace to model to rejigger old and inefficient operations and to invent entirely new uses, new solutions, products and service. Both researchers and practitioners are making increasing efforts to understand how to harness consumer's valuable knowledge in the innovation process. Accordingly, in this paper, crowdsourcing is explored in the innovation context, namely in the context of creative crowdsourcing, or peer-vetted creative production, in the case of a global consumer goods company looking for new products to its Latin American markets. This paper analyses the initiative, highlighting how external knowledge generation can be combined to internal knowledge generation in search of innovation. The case included knowledge generation of more than 850 individuals, resulting to 11 new products moving along the company's new process development process.