Tap Into the Power of Crowdsourcing with Deloitte Pixel™

Deloitte Pixel

We help clients tap into the power of external crowds―the vast number of people outside your organization that have the ideas, insights, skills, experience, or time that will drive your next product or service or build complex algorithms. Deloitte Pixel was created in 2014 on the premise that external crowds could help us deliver better, faster, and cheaper outcomes for our clients. We realized that crowd-based solutions must be pixelated, or broken apart, into their component pieces so we can target the right crowd for each component. Since then, we've completed 450 crowdsourcing challenges across 250 projects, worked with tens of thousands of crowd participants, and partnered with 20 crowdsourcing platforms.

Here's what we've learned:

• Crowdsourcing is a complex and dizzying world. It's a fairly nascent and very fragmented market, with no standards across platforms, varying degrees of quality assurance, and a disconnect between what crowds can do and what businesses need.
• Crowdsourcing is here to stay. Crowdsourcing is a major component of the open talent economy and the workforce of the future. Companies and workers alike want more flexibility and options.
• External crowds > internal crowds. If you're interested in crowdsourcing to get work done, the greater scalable value is through engaging the 3 billion+ connected individuals around the world. They're smart, skilled, and ready when you need them. 
• It's not just about the money. There are many reasons people participate in the crowd. While money is often important, there are many other non-monetary incentives that drive participation as well. Understanding and crafting a holistic incentive structure can make or break a crowdsourcing project.
• 1+1=3. The outsized value of crowdsourcing comes from combining the outcomes from multiple crowds. Most crowdsourcing platforms focus on a niche capability, such as digital design, expert insights, or user experience testing. While each can be valuable on its own, a holistic solution to your business problem requires mixing, matching, and combining multiple individual crowds.
• Crowdsourcing isn't a "set it and forget it" model. The process has to be managed, from understanding which crowd platforms are right for your need and how to combine outputs from multiple crowds to managing confidential data and other risks, performing additional quality assurance, and seamlessly integrating outputs into your business process. Insufficient focus on these details is the number one reason companies have a poor experience when they experiment with crowdsourcing. 

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How can you tap into the power of crowdsourcing?

• Application Development: Add digital capacity and speed to market in a timely and cost effective way
• Rapid Concept Development: Engage consumers and experts to co-create, develop, and test new concepts
• Continuous Insights: Get longitudinal perspectives from consumers and industry experts to stay on top of consumer insights, industry trends, and leading practices
• Future Scenarios: Harness the collective wisdom of industry experts to define, priortzie, and plan for complex scenarios your business or sector is likely to face 
• Rapid Prototyping: Quick test and jumpstart the development of new ideas as a way to make more informed investment decisions
• Predictive Analytics: Access top talent and build analytics solutions in a safe, nimble, and on-demand fashion

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How it works

Each crowd solution we develop works differently—different inputs and outputs, number and types of crowds and platforms, and varying degrees of management and QA. Our crowd philosophy and process are consistent—engage the right crowd at the right time, maintain confidentiality and anonymity for our clients, provide crowd participants only the information they need and don't force crowdsourcing if the project isn't a good fit.

We've developed relationships with more than 20 crowdsourcing companies so we're able to find the right crowd and the right crowd engagement model for each project or task. This approach gives us the flexibility to bring together multiple crowdsourcing platforms to help us to achieve the best outcome, and it means we don't force fit work into a suboptimal crowd model.

Below are a few of the crowdsourcing partner platforms with which we've created relationships.

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Work we've done

Review the case studies below to experience some of the ways we've helped other clients tap into crowdsourcing.

• Designing a crisis management platform: Struggling to align with a vision and requirements for an enterprise risk monitoring application, a global bank engaged Deloitte Pixel to paint a picture of their future solution. Through multiple digital design challenges, the crowd developed more than 35 visual prototypes that helped the bank drive consensus and move forward quickly.
• Imagining a better customer experience: Feeling constrained by legacy thinking, a communications providers turned to Deloitte Pixel™ to refresh its customer experience strategy using ideas sourced directly from consumers. We engaged three separate crowds and platforms through a series of challenges to co-create the ideal customer experience, including both products and services.
• Envisioning the future of commerce: Wanting to future-proof its long-term customer strategy across business units, a multinational client engaged Deloitte Pixel to unearth insights about the future of commerce to identify gaps and imagine new offerings. We launched five crowd challenges to engage consumers, interdisciplinary industry experts, and technologies to build a comprehensive view of banking and commerce in 2030.
• Build a machine learning algorithm: To better coordinate and optimize infrastructure builds and software deployments across its 250,000 employees, our clients turned to Deloitte Pixel and crowdsourcing. We engaged multiple crowds to generate 20,000 rows of training data, develop a continuous learning algorithm to analyze data from eight disparate sources, and build a visualization to support administrator decision making and workload planning.
• Designing and building a mobile application: the XPRIZE Foundation updated the way in which it evaluated ideas for the next XPRIZE competition and needed to build a mobile app in three months to power its Visioneers Summit. Deloitte Pixel managed seven crowd challenges to design, build, and test the mobile app that was used in the field by more than 250 judges, luminaries, and participants.

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Perspectives

The value of crowdsourcing
A public sector guide to harnessing the crowd

The three billion
Enterprise crowdsourcing and the growing fragmentation of work

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Let's talk

Puneet Kakar Principal | Deloitte Consulting LLP pukakar@deloitte.com
Balaji Bondili Senior Manager | Deloitte Consulting LLP bbondili@deloitte.com

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