There’s a new way that’s come up to help solve perplexing business problems.

With the power of the Internet, you can reach out to a great number of people at any particular point in time. Smart companies are now using this to solve complex problems that their internal staff while very bright people are just not able to find the solution for.

This is called crowd solving.

For example, Proctor & Gamble need to improve its margins on toothpaste. They need to find a way to get more toothpaste into the tube. Now, Proctor had plenty of extremely sharp engineers, some of the best minds in the business. They were given the challenge, but could not come up with a particular solution. However, here’s the creative thing that they did.

They put a reward out on the internet to a group. Let’s call it, I’m not sure the exact number, but let’s call it $25,000. They were very specific on the particular problem and the kind of results that had to be achieved. The reward goes to who could figure out a solution that achieves results they were looking for.

Within a day, the solution to the problem arrived. The saving were many times over $25,000 to them. It happened that it didn’t come from a packaging engineer. Instead, it came from somebody with a totally different perspective. This was a physicist who looked at the problem from a different angle and saw it as more of a problem of physics. By pointing out changes that needed to be made in certain properties of material, the solution was found.

So, what makes this work so well? One is some very bright people out there with many different perspectives. Second is it can be a very different approach that creates the solution that you are looking for. It’s not likely to come up from someone who’s very close to the problem and used to thinking about it in a traditional way. Third, through the power of the Internet and through groups, you can reach a lot of the top talent without much difficulty.

On a completely smaller scale, I’ve used this in the past. I needed to have a new logo and business card done. I posted $150 at a site called DesignOutpost.com. I laid out specifications in terms of rough guidelines for the card. I then had several people competing with preliminary designs on my business card. I was even able to throw back suggestions and some people even did a second round of work on the card. This was even before I had awarded a winner to complete the design of the business card. It turned out to be a great success and extremely reasonable considering it only cost me $150.

So, if you face a challenge that your internal folks don’t seem to be able to solve and one that might be too expensive or you don’t have a consultant, perhaps, with that expertise, consider throwing out the problem to a group on the internet. There might just be somebody out there with that particular solution that could far exceed your expectation and could be done extremely quickly.

Jon Paul, MBA, CPA, CMC, CM&AA

President, Value Added Finance Resources
Bringing new insights on results and maximizing company value