Welcome in today's business where change is the only constant. The companies continue to invent new products and technologies. The innovative and improved technologies transform the industries and companies and change lives. But it involves so many challenges and difficulties. Still they are pursuing for better products to cater the future needs of customers. At IBM Smarter Cities Technology Center, a. team of engineers was working on restructuring the city road system by using the mobile phone data. Almost 2.5 billion call records from five million mobile users in Ivory Coast were used to give a final touch to this operation. The data was used to improve the public transport service in the city. Once the suggestions are executed, the Ivory Coast would be only city to witness the world's first ‘Crowd shaped' road system. A road system wisely and beautifully re - engineered with the help of information collected through the data of its commuters. In the chapter we will try to know what is crowd shaping and how is it affecting the life of a retail shopper in this technical savvy world?
TopThe Evolution Of Crowdshaping
The traditional marketing and product development strategies are based on the information extracted from a data retrieved from a crowd of people or customers since last so many years. The legacy is going on and it is still considered the best way to improve the products and services. But the methods of acquiring the data have been transformed. Big Data, Cloud Computing, The Internet of Things, Real Time Data, and the various disruptive technologies have enabled us for tailor made future where we would be able to mold the required technology and product as our own preferences and convenience. Several companies have harnessed the information collected from the network of individuals in the form of crowd sourcing. The crowd sourcing is more authentic and better solution provider technique in comparison to traditional problem-solving approaches. In fact, the crowd shaping is resultant of sum of the various activities, arising in form of outcome of customizing data at various stages. It can be shown as –
CSP = ∑ CS, OS, OI, UI, OSWhere, CSP is Crowd Shaping,CS is Crowd Sourcing,OS is Out Sourcing,OI is Open Innovation andOS is Open Source.
The traces of evolution of the crowd sourcing are available since 18th century in Britain (Halder, 2014). In 18th and 19th century the crowd sourcing was used only for scientific invention but in 20th century other areas like arts, commerce and especially in product development it has been widely used (Halder, 2014). The application of crowd sourcing has been utilized in the areas of travelling (Blanc & Figliozzi, 2016), Online marketing (Sukaini, 2016) and fundraising (Mariani, Annunziata, Nacchia & Vastola, 2016) too.