Working the Crowd – Don’t Get Lost

Innovation management has evolved, and crowd-power plays a massive role in creating value efficiently. Crowdassets represent an enduring source of innovation and adapting to crowd-led approaches offers a greater, deeper source of expertise that aligns development with consumer wants and needs. This article highlights the importance of planning, analysis, and forethought when applying crowd-led approaches to innovation management, and that harnessing the crowd requires a strategic context to do so successfully. The TAMP process is presented as a decision support system, sense-making framework, and gap analysis tool. Innovation capabiltiies are needed to address common innovation approaches such as awareness and communication, organizational culture, and collaboration, anticipations of changes and trends, involvement of the crowd in the idea generation process, engagement with the crowd to test product/services development, and adoption of change indicators. Identifying and nurturing the community and crowd can be daunting, but frameworks and approaches exist to help organizations prepare for successful engagement with the crowd.