Crowdsourcing is increasingly forging its weight in companies that are joining innovation as the main axis to progress in a world where technology is ahead of people. But how to achieve an effective union of people and technology? This is a good example.
To do so, we will recover a striking case in the mining industry: the Goldcorp challenge .
What is crowdsourcing?
We must introduce ourselves to the subject knowing what concepts we are dealing with and why this term has become a benchmark for companies.
This English word comes from the union of crowd and outsourcing – external resources. Open outsourcing of tasks would be a good definition in English.
Crowdsourcing consists of taking activities previously performed by employees to the outside, leaving them in charge of a group of people or a specific community through an open call .
Advantages of crowdsourcing in the company
The organizations that carry out this methodology will select the most suitable people to carry out the different projects, solve the most complex problems and contribute to the advancement of the business through relevant ideas. What are the benefits?
- By being anonymous, they gain more confidence to expose what they really think about a product or service.
- People who see the company from the outside propose initiatives from another point of view that cause changes in focus .
- It reduces efforts and costs because the selected group does not work as just another employee. This equipment will help to perform certain jobs for a specific reward.
The search for gold. The first example of crowdsourcing
It may be reductionist to present the case of Goldcorp as the first example of crowdsourcing. The truth is that many experts classify it as such, due to its size and because it is a clear case of collaborative outsourcing.
In the late 1990s, Canadian gold mining company Goldcorp was going through a crisis. They did not earn significant profits, mainly. Its founder, Rob McEwen, called in geologists from the organization and asked them to look for more gold at the Red Lake mine.
These experts determined that the amount of gold could be remarkable, but it was necessary to think about where to start looking .
McEwen wanted the process to be neither time-consuming nor excessively costly, considering the situation the company was in.
Fifty percent of all these locations were previously unknown to the company.
Goldcorp and its Linux inspiration
Inspired by the construction of the Linux software operating system, McEwen decided to take crowdsourcing as a solution .
To this end, the company’s founder proposed to publish all the geological data from an investigation carried out by the company in 1948 on that enclave.
With a reward of $575,000, participants from all over the world dared to review all this data in order to find the location of the gold. This challenge generated four winning solutions .
A 3D map of Red Lake was constructed where Goldcorp could identify 110 deposit sites. What is surprising is that fifty percent of all these locations were previously unknown to the company.
CiBUC’s commitment to crowdsourcing
At CiBUC we conceive of crowdsourcing as one of the most valuable utilities of the collective intelligence [artificial] as it allows us to throw all kinds of challenges and challenges to the crowd in search of the best solution, but with a major difference and that is that CiBUC does not focus on individual solutions, but towards the best collective solutionssynthesized with A.I. through grouping, combining and voting processes.
