There has been a lot of attention and activity around the benefits of crowd-sourcing; much of it warranted. But for all the fanfare, the real value remains largely untapped.

There have been a good number of variations and adaptations to the crowd-sourcing exercise: large-scale brainstorming sessions, ideation jams, idea scrums, group challenges... however few organizations have leveraged this tremendous but still somewhat dormant resource for the heavy lifting around innovation; specifically, the significant tasking that goes into every idea end-to-end. This is an important opportunity to consider as organizations from all sectors struggle with getting more done with less. Compounding this logistical conundrum is the need to get more done with increasingly fewer and less-accessible SMEs, who are already the “go to” people for a number of other high-priority roles, mandates and/or projects; the desire to pitch-in on a new idea may be there, but the time to do so may not: choices have to be made, with the sureness of the “here-and-now” tasks routinely trumping the potential of those that are “great-but-maybe”.

Enter your crowd – they can be tapped from any number of stakeholder groups: employees, customers, suppliers, academics, professional groups, communities of practice, social networks... their diversity matched in importance only by the sheer expanse of their numbers; un-limited by geography, time zones or rules of old and driven by interest, affinity, expertise and motivation. I’ll take as many of these external dynamos as I can get – they are driven to produce.

Give these folks a platform to self-organize, a clear mission and a certain reward structure based on success, and stand back. Like a bacteria eating away at cells, they will find opportunities, accelerate tasking, engage others, circumvent road-blocks and produce for the innovation effort organically like no one else – it’s in their nature.

They are common denominators that deliver un-common results.