Crowd Engineering: Manage crowd contributions for design and manufacture of innovative products

The increasing complexity of designing and manufacturing products as well as the growing speed required for their innovation is pushing large and medium-small companies to an ever-broader search for new ideas and for a wide availability of experts, able to provide timely contributions. Existing approaches mainly address the early phases of the product lifecycle in the frame of “open innovation”. The crowd engineering approach is to organize an efficient and effective utilization of the “crowd”, i.e. a wide set of persons, from students to private experts, and to start-ups and smart SMEs, which could be involved in the creation of innovative products. The first purpose of the paper is to give a presentation of Crowd Engineering in terms of a logical frame where crowd-workers will contribute into an informal collaborative network to fulfill technical and social needs. Then a schematic model based on an analogy between Crowd Engineering and Supply Relationship Management, will be outlined thus offering, on one hand, suggestions for a real implementation, on the other, some hints for a research agenda.