Crowdstorm: The Future of Innovation, Ideas, and Problem Solving

Chapter 6

Recruit the Best Participants

You’re only as good as the people you hire.

—Ray Kroc

When we think about recruiting, we instinctively focus on who might have the expertise to submit a response to solve our problem. But when we take this approach, we miss an important opportunity to let valuable talent participate in smaller but still useful ways like rating a solution or offering feedback. Like supporting roles in a movie, these roles are easy to overlook; but movies would not work without them.

We have identified three crowdstorm patterns to reflect different roles so we can better understand who we might recruit and what we will expect them to do. For the moment we are just focused on recruiting, but we will continue to revisit these patterns as they impact many aspects of the crowdstorm process: from measuring contributions enabling fair reward to managing much larger numbers of contributors when we look to add more supporting roles.

We will refer back to the patterns in Figure 6.1 throughout the rest of the book.

Figure 6.1 Crowdstorming Interactive Patterns

The patterns reflect roles and interactions between the people who are both inside and outside an organization. As more roles are added, the number of participants and interactions rises sharply. The key attributes of these patterns are as follows:

• Search: The focus is finding and recruiting domain experts from ...