Le crowdsourcing : une source d'innovation pour entreprises et organisations

By late 2012, the French crowdsourcing-for-enterprise market had a particular shape — different from the U.S. equivalent, partly because of the French intellectual-property regime, partly because of the strong tradition of association-based collaborative work, and partly because of the post-Web-2.0 startup wave producing French-headquartered platforms targeting European enterprises. eYeka (creative crowdsourcing for brands), Wilogo (graphic-design crowdsourcing), Hypios (R&D crowdsourcing), and Sculpteo (3D-printing-as-a-service with crowd-design overtones) were among the most-cited French crowdsourcing platforms of the period.

The framing the article would have advanced — crowdsourcing as a source of innovation for enterprises and public-sector organisations — corresponded to what the open-innovation literature was calling 'open innovation 2.0' or 'broadcast search' in the Eric von Hippel and Karim Lakhani research streams. The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, then in its early phase under Tom Malone, was producing some of the most-cited research on the design parameters that distinguished productive crowdsourcing from non-productive variants.

On the public-sector side, the French government's 2011 establishment of the Etalab open-data mission and the 2012 launch of various ministry-level innovation programmes were beginning to use crowdsourcing patterns for policy consultation, code reuse, and citizen-science programmes coordinated through CNRS. The article belonged to the period when crowdsourcing was moving from a particular Web 2.0 product category into a more general organisational practice that public and private institutions were figuring out how to operationalise.