I think the biggest change we have seen in the development environment over the years, is the increasing readiness among developers to share ideas. No longer are people possessive over their ideas and closed to criticism, rather they enjoy the process of deliberating with a community to help build and perfect their idea. And the results speak for itself. We are now witnessing phenomenal apps with amazing technology built and perfected by an entire brigade of developers. This is precisely why I wholeheartedly recommend crowdsourcing and open innovation as an app development model. Let us break down crowdsourcing and understand the opportunities it can open up for your app.
The biggest advantage of Open Innovation, is the valuable inputs you can get about the basic features of your app from the development community. You can roughly figure out how good your idea is based on the response you get before you even start development. Open Innovation is the best way to go, especially for rookie developers because of the sheer volume of things the project can teach you. Working with a large, experienced development community will teach you more than any book ever can.
You will also have an entire army of testers waiting to test drive your app. You will save a considerable amount of time during development, by leaving testing in their more than able hands. Crowdsourcing is a great way to save money too, as you don’t need to hire dedicated professionals to work on your app.
Crowsourcing however does come with its risks. Outsourcing important projects to a faceless crowd could lead to poor quality, misuse of privileged information and so on. For this I recommend, even if you allow a crowd to work on your project, ensure you still pull the strings. You should have to authorize any permanent changes to the app and the distribution on data.
While experienced developers are often ready to take risks and spend a good amount of time and money working on their most outrageous ideas, the new developers are almost always apprehensive. One can never be sure if your great idea, would translate into a popular app. Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation is great way to overcome this challenge as with this model, you have nothing to lose. You can just innovate, without a care in the world.
