Management strategy performance

Business organizations often strive and work hard to establish themselves ahead of others in the industry and command various activities in the industry. However, to become a leader in the market, effective and strategic planning is required. Business firms, therefore, tend to use various strategies in developing a proper relationship with customers and consequently extending their floors of operations. Use of the internet is one of the most outstanding avenues through which firms develop strong stability in the market. Crowdsourcing is thus one of the internet avenues through which business information, data, and opinion are collected. Crowdsourcing involves obtaining, information, opinions or work from a large group of people who submit data through the internet, smartphone Apps or social media. It is, therefore, the practice of sourcing for information into a task or project through enlisting the services of a large group of people either unpaid or paid through the internet (Brabham, 2013). This study, therefore, intends to offer a comprehensive discussion on Threadless. It will explain the success behind threadless, competitive advantages it accrues to companies and logic behind crowdsourcing. It will further identify various business functions that can gain a massive breakthrough via the application of crowdsourcing.

Threadless is an online community of artists and consequently an e-commerce website. Designs are threadless are created by and consequently chosen by an online community. Threadless built its business through a crowdsourcing model. It has, however, acquired a lot of success since its inception. Effective use of crowdsourcing is, however, the main reason behind the success of crowdsourcing (Howe, 2006). Through crowdsourcing model, Threadless has been able to put some defined work out to a community and allow the community members to compete to win the project. The power of crowdsourcing is thus the pillar behind the success of Threadless.

Developing a competitive advantage over other companies in the industry is an imperative step. Companies with competitive advantages often enjoy economies of scale, thus making a lot of profit (Lane, 2010). Threadless enjoys numerous competitive advantages over its peers in the design industry. Threadless draws attention to its community - centered business model. It depends heavily on its community to the point where we cannot imagine its product apart from the community. The community is, therefore, threadless' main competitive advantage (Michelson, 2010). Integration of customers across the value chain is another competitive advantage the business enjoys. Moreover, Threadless has a strong and established preparation and execution process of its goals as well as the strategic plan (Estellés-Arolas & González-Ladrón-De-Guevara, 2012).

Unlike comparable design firms that use traditional strategies, Threadless deploys the use of crowdsourcing in collecting data and information about what the customers need hence acting upon the particular needs to improve the quality of services they offer. Through the community, Threadless can acquire rich information about their clients as well as other market information. Other competitive advantages that Threadless enjoys include; use of gamification. Through gamification, Threadless can engage the community hence creating a spirit of competition among artists who consequently use social media to reach more customers (Lane, 2010). Giving back to the community and use of social media direct traffic to the website are other competitive advantages. Threadless shifts its attention to the artists rather than the product is thereby positioning the organization as a platform more than merely a brand. People, therefore, view Threadless as a platform that supports artists hence a competitive advantage (Horton, & Chilton, 2010).

Crowdsourcing has stood out in the current generation as a massive force behind the success of many businesses. The logic behind the model has therefore caught the eyes people, especially in the business world. The rationale of crowdsourcing, however, is co-creation (Michelson, 2010). Through the logic of co-creation, the organization, which sums up as the source provides instructions as well as incentives to the community, otherwise called the "crowd" to solve specific challenges. The organization is, therefore, able to solve different problems and challenges by offering incentives and instructions to the community. Through the co-creation logic, many fields have been able to get a breakthrough via application of crowdsourcing (Lane, 2010). Outsourcing of tasks has, therefore, been made easier through the co-creation mechanism. Identification and solutions to complex issues, generation of profitable ideas, money saving for companies and feedback reception are among the several areas that have greatly seen the lights of crowdsourcing (Doan, Ramakrishnan, & Halevy, 2011). Crowdsourcing has therefore attracted interest from different quotas in the business world due to its outstanding solutions.

Despite its wide use and unending advantages, crowdsourcing, just like other tools introducing by the internet has numerous gaps and limitations that should be addressed effectively by current and potential users of the model. The most pronounced limitation of crowdsourcing is compromised confidentiality (Lane, 2010). Testing in crowdsourcing is performed by a large group of people. Some people within the large group performing the testing may not have loyalty to the brand or product. Crowdsourcing, therefore, permits competitors to get access to confidential information and secrets of an organization, thus not confidentiality (Michelson, 2010). The gap of confidentiality is therefore wide with crowdsourcing.

Difficulty in Communication between testers is another challenging facing people using crowdsourcing due to both language barrier and time constraints (Michelson, 2010). Test coverage is another challenge that accompanies the use of crowdsourcing. More managerial oversight is often required to guarantee test coverage through bug identification. It is, therefore difficult to ensure testing of entire products to ensure usability (Horton, & Chilton, 2010). It is thus imperative for users of the model to have a full understanding of the challenges, gaps, and limitations of crowdsourcing to reduce its disadvantages.

Besides design, crowdsourcing has a wide range of use in both business functions and other businesses. Healthcare is one of the businesses that heavily use crowdsourcing in its functions. Healthcare organizations deploy crowdsourcing in getting information, views, and ideas of people regarding their services (Behrend, Sharek, Meade, & Wiebe, 2011). Moreover, it uses crowdsourcing in conducting medical research (Lane, 2010). Through crowdsourcing, views and ideas can be collected hence promoting medical research. Innovation is another imperative business function commonly done through crowdsourcing. Many business organizations tend to use the model in getting ideas of people hence using such ideas in creating new things hence innovation.

In conclusion, it is right to infer that the huge success celebrated by Threadless is attributed to its effective use of crowdsourcing. The model has enabled threadless to acquire a lot of customers and competitive advantages over its peer in the design industry. It is, however, imperative to underscore various limitations and gaps experienced by business firms using crowdsourcing. The model has numerous advantages, albeit with notable limitation. Care should thus be taken to ensure the limitations do not overrule the benefits. Healthcare facilities have also benefited from the use of crowdsourcing.

References

Brabham, D. C. (2013). Crowdsourcing. MIT Press.

Behrend, T. S., Sharek, D. J., Meade, A. W., & Wiebe, E. N. (2011). The viability of crowdsourcing for survey research. Behavior research methods, 43(3), 800.

Doan, A., Ramakrishnan, R., & Halevy, A. Y. (2011). Crowdsourcing systems on the world-wide-web. Communications of the ACM, 54(4), 86-96.

Estellés-Arolas, E., & González-Ladrón-De-Guevara, F. (2012). Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition. Journal of Information science, 38(2), 189-200.

Horton, J. J., & Chilton, L. B. (2010, June). The labor economics of paid crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Electronic commerce (pp. 209-218). ACM.

Howe, J. (2006). The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired magazine, 14(6), 1-4.

Lane, S. (2010). Collective intelligence for competitive advantage: crowdsourcing and open innovation.

Michelson, G. K. (2010). U.S. Patent No. 7,704,255. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.