Abstract
Crowdsourcing is an innovative business practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content or even funds by soliciting contributions from a large group of people (the ‘Crowd’). The potential benefits of utilizing crowdsourcing in product design are well-documented, but little research exists on what are the barriers and opportunities in adopting crowdsourcing in new product development (NPD) of manufacturing SMEs. In order to answer the above questions, a Proof of Market study is carried out on crowdsourcing-based product design under an Innovate UK funded Smart project, which aims at identifying the needs, challenges and future development opportunities associated with adopting crowdsourcing strategies for NPD. The research findings from this study are reported here and can be used to guide future development of crowdsourcing-based collaborative design methods and tools and provide some practical references for industry to adopt this new and emerging collaborative design method in their business.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1052-1066 |
| Journal | Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| Early online date | 24 Oct 2016 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2016 |
Keywords
- new product development
- open design innovation
- collaborative design
- crowd sourcing
- manufacturing
- SMEs