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.