Crowd-Design: mapping of the crowd-based processes used by companies to develop products

Resumo

From the term crowdsourcing, coined by Howe (2006), “crowd” prefixes appeared to nominate processes that occur through the Internet and with the crowd participation. Due to the importance of the collaboration and customer participation in the product development process (PDP), it’s important to clarify what crowd-based processes are directly affecting the practice of Design concerning the PDP, and in which phases they happen. This way, this paper presents an investigation regarding the concept and characteristics of the process used to develop products that occurs trough the Internet with the crowd, called Crowd-Design. To do so, it was necessary to find out in the current literature: (i) the definition of crowdsourcing and its main practices, (ii) the definition of Crowd-Design, and (iii) the definition of PDP and its general model. As a complement to the literature findings, the analysis of the already existent Crowd-Design processes was carried out through a benchmark analysis of four online platforms from companies such as Lego, Dell, Unilever and Procter & Gamble. After that, it was possible: (i) to nominate the crowd-process applied to the Crowd-Design practices and (ii) to verify in which phases of the PDP – given by Rozenfeld et al. (2006) – the crowd-based processes has been used.