Crowdsourcing Innovation

In traditional product development practice, there is a separation between gathering data from customers about their needs--via interviews, observations, focus groups, and surveys--and proposing new product concepts. The classic example of this separation is, "People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!" (Theodore Levitt’s example from Harvard Business Review, 1960). In that view, managers guiding innovation should consult the users for what needs to happen, not rely on the users themselves to dream big about how it can happen. Crowdsourcing in innovation allows us rethink this separation. We can ask the crowd directly to provide the solutions, then work backward to infer what is on their minds.

source: www.fastcocreate.com
http://www.carddit.com/go/t8C5VhBLP?src=www.fastcocreate.com