Accelerating customer integration into innovation processes using Pico-Jobs

The internet enabled new forms of crowdsourcing by introducing electronic marketplaces for services that could hardly be traded before. Market places such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk install a member base for third parties, where they can offer small, highly structured paid tasks which can hardly be solved automatically with ICT which we call Pico-Jobs. In this paper a new method for systematically utilizing the creative potential of the users of these market places for new product development is illustrated. We elaborate the characteristics of Pico-Jobs by reviewing leading crowdsourcing marketplaces. Our real-world case with OSRAM then pinpoints the potentials of Pico-Jobs for idea generation and validation such as the speed and the dynamic of involving customers into innovation processes. The article concludes with a discussion of potentials and limitations for companies applying Pico-Jobs. The article contributes a new concept for conducting open innovation and shows possibilities for future research in this area.