I [Jeffrey Phillips] read with great interest the post by Grant McCracken that addresses the "brief" moment in the sun for creative types. Grant's concern is that crowdsourcing will allow corporations to source design skills, ideas and other creative concepts from the internet, rather than turning to creative design organizations. In this, he is probably right. There's a growing awareness that there are good ideas "out there" if we can only tap them. You need look no further than Dell's IdeaStorm or BestBuy's Idea Exchange for proof. Currently you can create a campaign or contest to design a new logo. Chuck Frey's new logo at Innovation Tools was designed in a contest, and he allowed many of his readers to vote on the designs they liked best. What I'm having a hard time with is that the concerns McCracken raises are misplaced in my opinion.
Yes, there are thousands of creative types working in their homes and hundreds of thousands of people who have good ideas for Dell, and for BestBuy. And who could provide ideas to firms that really need them, like General Motors, or the Federal Government. But I digress. All we've done with crowdsourcing is leverage the internet to capture the ideas these individuals have always had. The internet has simply provided a marketplace for us to exchange our skills with willing buyers, whether those skills are design skills, or ideation skills, or photography skills in the case of Flickr and other photography sites. While this is happening, this doesn't portend the end of creative design firms or innovation teams in businesses. Here's why.
Original Article: Innovate on Purpose: Value added innovation
