The same instinct for arriving at innovative solutions can be applied to solving business challenges too – Of course the penalty for failure need not be as dramatic as in the game of life  

Although, the goal of encouraging communities to solve a business challenge can be achieved through an open question on the internet, a few simple steps can be taken to make the process and the solution more optimal. 

The six steps:

1. Build a focused community: A focused community that both understands and is excited by a certain type of business challenge should be created and nurtured. In the case of  CrowdANALYTIX, this is a select community of predictive analytics experts from over 15 countries, 90% of whom have a Masters degree or above.
2. Define clear problem statement: Have a well-defined process and owner for converting an enterprise's challenge into a well-defined problem statement. This part of the process requires several interactions with the enterprise and should be owned by a very senior domain expert.
3. Create a contest: The problem statement should be posed to the community in the form of a contest. A contest is the best way of simulating a Darwinian-like natural selection process that encourages all participants to deliver their best. This format is the key to encouraging new and innovative solutions that don't just meet standards but set them for others to follow.
4. Encourage Coopetition: Allow the community some freedom to collaborate and to self-organize as needed. This dichotomy of competition and collaboration is what will ensure that the best solutions always bubble up.
5. Incentivize right: Incentivize to encourage participants to deliver their best – remember, people compete not only for the money but more so for the desire to be respected among peers.
6. Define clear selection criteria: Be absolutely clear about the selection criteria – fairness builds credibility and inturn attracts the best solution architects.

At CrowdANALYIX, we focus on solving data-driven business problems, however, these steps are applicable to almost all types of business challenges. A new era is beginning – one in which, enterprises will know with certainty that their business and business processes are running at the highest possible efficiency and with the best possible solutions. This is the era of Managed Crowdsourcing!

Enterprises that ignore this shift and don't take advantage of community-driven innovations will most definitely lag behind and could eventually be driven out of business entirely. Luckily, Managed Crowdsourcing not only makes solutions better and faster, but also allows enterprises to arrive at them more cost-efficiently, further reducing the resource accessibility gap between small and large enterprises.