Focus Groups vs Crowdsourcing Debate

Focus groups are out. Crowdsourcing is in.

Those who make a living on the bleeding edge are proposing Web 2.0 social networking technologies as replacements for focus groups.

Today's oft recommended solution-du-juor, crowdsourcing, is defined as, "the use of people and companies to help other people and companies for compensation," according to Paul Poutanen, president of crowdsourcing firm, Mob4hire. 

That doesn't sound so different from focus groups. 

But wait, they say. Unlike focus groups, crowdsourcing is inexpensive, unbiased, fast and reliable...because large numbers of customers are collaborating in the innovation process right there with you, in real time. 

With crowdsourcing, they say, all you have to do is define a problem for the crowd to solve, find customers who care and who can solve the problem, invite them and compensate them for their contributions.  Companies need only facilitate the collaboration process and discern which of their many ideas the company should implement.

That's unlike focus groups, where you have to define the problem, find qualified customers, compensate them, facilitate the process and figure out which of their ideas to implement. 

See the difference??? 

Neither did I.

The fact is that both crowd sourcing and focus groups have their place.  Choosing requires exercising judgement in defining the problem to be solved and in how each tool is most usefully applied.  The chooser must be able describe why one tool was chosen over another in way that is informed, transparent, and imbues decision makers with confidence.

I'll write more in upcoming posts about situations in which crowdsourcing, focus groups and other tools are optimally used. 

In the meantime, remember that information technologies are only tools.  They render value measured by the skill of the hands using them.

--Jason M. Sherman

Jason M. Sherman is president of Whyze Group.  The company uses crowdsourcing, focus groups and other tools on behalf of Fortune 500 companies that are learning how to innovate their customer experiences.

Comments

[Jason M. Sherman]

Thanks for your comments, Santtu. I believe there's an element of wisdom in your suggesting that there's more control in selecting focus group participants than crowd members. I'm not sure I'm on board with the notion that there's less rigor required in identifying valuable insight from focus groups than from crowdsourcing. Both require business savvy and understanding of psychological and social contexts to separate strategically valuable insights from interesting but useless factoids on the backend.

Enagaging qualified crowdsters at the beginning of a crowdsourced project is largely dependent on the task that you're asking the crowd to perform. And, there needs to be some deep thinking here.

For example, Threadless uses crowdsourcing to delegate both t-shirt design and selection of winning designs to the crowd. This appropriately engages a wide audience with minimal business risks for Threadless. The crowd in this case is perfectly qualified to be the arbiter of design preference. The strategic risks to Threadless are minimal, commensurate with the production of winning t-shirt designs and other relatively minor costs.

In other industries where the business risks are much higher, (e.g. surgical instrument design), I would suggest that the task needs to be much more rigorously defined to attract and engage the right crowd.

[Santtu Toivonen]

Could one difference be that focus group approach is more selective in the profiles of participating individuals than crowdsourcing? Focus groups do more selection of applicants, and do it beforehand, whereas crowdsourcing is more free in accepting applicants and does more aposteriori selection on the answers (rather than people).