Global Access For Crowd Capital - 1378 Words

The implications for entrepreneurs seeking to gain global access to crowd capital are discussed encompassing seven streams impacting the entrepreneurship innovation process from product concept, design leading up to commercialization of resulting intellectual property from crowdsourced initiatives along the lines of: (1) decision to buy, build or borrow the crowdsourcing platform; (2) ownership, technology transfer, and intellectual property rights; (3) leveraging value network, globalization, virtual communities, collectivities and social media; (4) financial model and innovation commercialization; (5) leveraging the business model and value creation by aggregating key competencies between the firm and the crowd while facilitating IP†¦show more content†¦Each of these options has advantages and disadvantages. Commercial software can be expensive. Moreover, it may have more functionality that is not warranted (e.g. prediction capabilities, idea reward currency, etc). To date , larger corporations, such as IBM, Dell, Cisco Systems, and Ericsson, have elected to build their own tools. Most have done so using internal staff and available platforms that conform to their IT environments. In the case of IBM, which has the most advanced tool, major upgrades have been done annually by external contractors with expertise not available in-house. One advantage of developing a tool is the ability to customize it to the organization s need. On the other hand, as an increasing number of organizations become interested in adopting crowdsourcing tools, it becomes inefficient and uneconomical for entrepreneurs to build and code the platform from scratch. Furthermore, these synergistic solutions of customizing off-the shelf commercial solution won t work well if desired results aren t clearly defined early in the crowdsourcing process. Using in-house development to enhance the off-the-shelf features of a crowdsourcing commercial