Crowd-Engineering: Managing Innovative Product Design by Widening Collaborations

Global contest has overwhelmed enterprises by the eager demand for products and services with high-tech features, along the entire product life cycle. Several companies reacted by developing the cooperation with high-tech firms. However, in the last decade, another revolutionary asset is emerging together with the worldwide networking evolution, namely the "Crowd-Engineering" (C-E): A huge, flexible and diversified human capital-made of individuals and consultants-available for companies to create their products and services. Together with these advantages, however, this asset calls for companies to face the complexity in the crowd management, selecting among competitive contributions and making all of them work effectively and efficiently. Therefore, there is an emerging need for methods and tools to manage C-E processes. This study presents a theoretical framework for managing and selecting crowd contributions along the whole New Product and service Development (NPD) project. Pros and cons of C-E applications are discussed.