A review of crowdsourcing technology for product design and development

With the ever improving availability of social media platforms, the internet and mobile devices, crowdsourcing becomes a popular business development strategy in outsourcing various tasks to outside crowds. In product design and development, one of the crowdsourcing objectives is to engage various users into human-centered design processes and outsource tasks to crowds for better design efficiency, quality and business benefits. There are many studies about crowdsourcing from different viewpoints, but none of them focuses on crowdsourcing technology review, especially in product design and development. In this paper, we report a literature review of crowdsourcing technology including the task assignment techniques, incentive mechanism and communication skills, crowdsourcing framework, and platforms. We also discuss the existing problems: 1) current crowdsourcing platforms only partly support product design activities; 2) crowd workers' privacy may be threatened; 3) some cheat phenomenon may exist on some platforms. Finally, we suggest the future directions on the related crowdsourcing technology.