Crowd Sourcing Platform for Product Development

Crowd sourcing offers product designers the potential to develop better products at a lower
cost that more closely meet the needs of consumers in their target markets.
This project aims to conduct a proof of market study of crowd sourcing tools for product
design, identifying which features would be most valuable to different product designers, the
market sizes, and potential grow rate over next 5 to 10 years.
Crowd-sourcing is an innovative business practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or
content or even funds by soliciting contributions from a large group of people (the ‘Crowd’),
and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.
Product design and development companies either in the creative industries or manufacturing
and engineering sectors, large and small, can significantly improve their business operations
if they are able to access the ‘Crowd’ through their social media based crowd-sourcing design
processes and platforms. But some challenges have to be addressed properly, for example, key
functions for supporting both technical design and non-technical design, innovative business
models for industry use and the crowd engagement, UX design and data exploration tools for
treating huge amount of data gained via crowd-sourcing.
This project will focus on a proof of market study.