Many people have heard of popular crowdsourcing businesses like Threadless and CrowdSpring. However, you may not have heard of some of Canada’s budding companies in this arena. I thought it was worth noting some of the Canadian superheroes who are leading the charge in developing crowdsourcing technologies to support market research efforts.
The benefits of why a brand may want to crowdsource for future marketing and product innovations are simple. Companies are able to harness the wisdom of the social web and engage with groups of people to define and refine what they need to do next as a brand. Here’s an outline of two emerging Canadian crowdsource-focused research companies.
1. Chaordix – Chaordix is an enterprise-based crowdsourcing software platform and service. According to their website, the Chaordix platform was developed out of their own crowdsourcing research efforts – with input from a 50,000 member crowd. Their enterprise platform helps companies to uncover product innovations and consumer insights. Chaordix’s definition of crowdsourcing is “a way of engaging groups of people to submit, discuss, refine and rank ideas and submissions for a specific question posed by an organization.” Here is a link to a video produced by Chaordix which explains why crowdsourcing matters.
2. TrendHunter – TrendHunter.com boasts that they are the world’s most popular trend website. They gather hot trend information from the “collective insight of 42,000 crowdsourced trend experts.” With millions of views of data, TrendHunter is able to identify which trends are about to take off. Their founder, Jeremy Gutsche, recently published an award-winning book entitled Exploiting Chaos. This book helps to explain how companies can spark innovation during times of change.
Here’s a video from TrendHunterTV which explains how their platform works to help companies to identify the hot trends in their industry:
Both of these companies were listed as part of Canada’s top 20 hottest technology companies last year by the Canadian Innovation Exchange. It will be interesting to see where they both end up in a year from now.
Both great companies. Hopefully our new Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding Apps at Ideavibes can be seen as another viable option for using this powerful tool for solving problems or getting answers.