Key Crowdsourcing Technologies for Product Design and Development

Traditionally, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in manufacturing rely heavily on a skilled, technical and professional workforce to increase productivity and remain globally competitive. Crowdsourcing offers an opportunity for SMEs to get access to online communities who may provide requested services such as generating design ideas or problem solutions. However, there are some barriers preventing them from adopting crowdsourcing into their product design and development (PDD) practice. In this paper, we provide a literature review of key crowdsourcing technologies including crowdsourcing platforms and tools, crowdsourcing frameworks, and techniques in terms of open call generation, rewarding, crowd qualification for working, organization structure of crowds, solution evaluation, workflow and quality control and indicate the challenges of integrating crowdsourcing with a PDD process. We also explore the necessary techniques and tools to support the crowdsourcing PDD process. Finally, we propose some key guidelines for coping with the aforementioned challenges in the crowdsourcing PDD process.