Solving Product Strategy Problems With Co-Creation Contests

The development of successful products is at the heart of every profit-seeking business. Product strategists face constant internal challenges around identifying new product opportunities and feature sets, building those products to suit consumers' needs, and bringing those products to market. But co-creation — and co-creation contests in particular — can help by leveraging external resources to solve those internal problems. Co-creation contest vendors utilize a form of crowdsourcing to unite clients with a cultivated community on a social online platform in order to help clients solve a business challenge. Challenge briefs can address a wide range of strategic or tactical business needs, and the engaged audience can vary from niche, custom-built crowds to, quite literally, anyone in the world. Product strategists have an opportunity to innovate the product development process by tapping into available external resources that co-creation contest vendors deliver.