R&D teams know that inspiration – and innovation – often comes from unlikely sources. If you’re limiting yourself to the talent and ideas within your own organization, you might be missing out on potential breakthroughs.
What if there was a way to tap into a much wider network of expertise, connect with diverse perspectives, and create a real culture of open innovation for your R&D team? You might want to consider crowdsourcing with the help of a visual collaboration platform. With the right collaboration tools and processes in place, your team can bridge expertise gaps and achieve some truly outside-the-box solutions.
What is crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is a method of using collective intelligence to solve complex problems and generate new ideas. It involves getting input from a wide network of people either cross-functionally across your organization, or outside your company such as external talent cross-industry professionals. Think of it as a way to expand your available expertise beyond what you have in-house.
There's no single way to crowdsource. It can take different forms like challenge-based innovation, open innovation, or even microtasking. Each model has its own unique fit depending on what you're trying to achieve.
How R&D teams use crowdsourcing to accelerate product innovation
Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for R&D teams looking to drive innovation and speed up product development. By leveraging the collective intelligence of people outside your organization, you can get fresh ideas and unconventional solutions for complex, multi-disciplinary projects. When you expand your solution space with input from cross-industry talent, you can approach problems from new angles, leading to more robust and innovative outcomes. This can be a key driver of innovation, whether you're launching a new product or improving an existing process.
Perhaps you are on the product team at a software company facing a complex bug in your core application that your internal team is struggling to diagnose and fix. Instead of relying solely on in-house developers, you may crowdsource the problem to the open-source community by posting the issue on a platform like GitHub. Or if you’re a food and beverage packaging company looking to create a new sustainable material, you may seek ideas from experts in chemical engineering or materials science. These diverse perspectives can help solve complex problems more quickly than going it alone.
To ensure you get the best results when R&D crowdsourcing, it's important to have a structured process in place. You need to establish clear mechanisms for vetting contributions, managing the flow of information, and ensure essential data is shared widely and in real time. A great way to find this structure for remote research teams? Through visual collaboration software.
Common barriers to knowledge flow and alignment when crowdsourcing innovation
Crowdsourcing can lead to a flood of ideas, but not all of them will be high-quality or relevant. It can be a real challenge to sift through a large volume of ideas to find the most viable and data-driven solutions. Without a clear vetting process, this can become a time-consuming and resource-intensive task.
And even if you find a brilliant solution from the crowd, integrating it into your existing processes, systems, and product roadmaps can be challenging. The idea might not align naturally with your company's long-term strategy, or it may be difficult to implement with your current technology stack. A solution that seems great on its own might be a hard sell to the broader organization.
How visual collaboration tools help streamline and enhance R&D crowdsourcing
Visual collaboration tools like Mural are a game-changer for crowdsourcing in R&D. These platforms provide a shared visual workspace where you can bring together global and cross-functional teams and can help you sort for potentially winning ideas and integrate them into effective workflows to bring them to fruition.
You can use these tools to co-create in real time, no matter where your diverse teams are located. By using templates for brainstorming or mind mapping to structure your sessions, you can spur creativity and create an essential record of interconnected ideas. This visual workspace centralizes knowledge and speeds up collective insight-building.
Using AI-enabled collaboration tools to accelerate crowdsourcing innovation even further
Crowdsourcing with a visual collaboration tool approach becomes even more powerful when it’s equipped with powerful AI-driven features. AI can act as an intelligent assistant, enhancing human creativity and efficiency, or it can analyze large amounts of data to provide insights that would take humans a long time to uncover. It can also help synthesize notes from a brainstorming session or recommend relevant information, helping your team move faster from ideation to action.
Tools like Mural AI can supercharge crowdsourcing innovation by providing features that streamline the entire process. Here are some examples of what Mural AI can do.
Create an effective starting point
Instead of starting the conversation with a blank page, you can use Mural AI to help structure it from the get-go. The Build a Mural feature can recommend and populate the best template for a workshop to help collaborating teams find a creative spark and get the ball rolling quickly.
Organize and understand feedback
When you're crowdsourcing ideas, you're bound to get a lot of input. Mural AI's Cluster feature automatically groups sticky notes by topic, and the Summarize feature can synthesize a long stream of notes into a concise summary. The Classify feature can even help you quickly gauge how people feel about certain ideas by categorizing notes as positive, negative, or neutral.
Align all essential stakeholders
To keep your teams aligned and projects moving forward, you can use features that automate tasks and keep information organized. Mural’s AI-powered stakeholder mapping features can help you visualize the entire stakeholder network for your project and be sure you’re including the correct subject-matter experts and decision-makers at every key step.
Learn more about the many ways Mural AI accelerates and empowers innovation for R&D teams, or talk to our specialists to see them firsthand in a demo.
FAQs
How can R&D leaders and innovation teams accelerate breakthrough solutions using crowdsourcing and visual collaboration tools?
By leveraging crowdsourcing and visual collaboration, R&D leaders can tap into a wide network of external talent and diverse perspectives, which can lead to fresh, unconventional solutions for complex problems. By using a visual collaboration tool like Mural, these teams can enable real-time co-creation and knowledge sharing, connecting global and cross-functional participants. This approach helps to overcome expertise gaps and improve cross-functional alignment, ultimately speeding up the problem-solving process and unlocking breakthrough solutions.
How does a visual workspace help overcome barriers to knowledge flow and alignment?
A visual workspace (like Mural) helps to clarify workflows, centralize knowledge, and accelerate collective insight building. By visually representing information in one place, it becomes easier for team members to get aligned and stay on the same page, which helps to break down silos and ensures everyone has access to the same information. This improves efficiency and reduces misunderstandings. Visual tools are especially effective for real-time collaboration because they allow for simultaneous work and a dynamic exchange of ideas.
How can AI-powered collaboration platforms enhance ideation, knowledge sharing, and decision-making in R&D?
AI-powered collaboration platforms enhance ideation, knowledge sharing, and decision-making by combining AI features with human input to deliver stronger results. AI features, such as automated synthesis or smart recommendations, help teams stay focused and move faster from ideation to action. AI can analyze large amounts of data to provide insights that would take humans a long time to uncover. It can also help with organizing and structuring information, making it easier for teams to build on each other's ideas. This synergy between human creativity and AI efficiency leads to more effective problem-solving in R&D.
.avif)
.webp)
.avif)
