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Professional Consultants or Crowd-sourcing?

2 heads better than 1. 2000 heads better than 2.

Experts wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica, and it ruled for 250 years. Then amateurs wrote Wikipedia.

On Who Want’s to be Millionaire, “Call the expert” helpline results in 57% accuracy. “Ask the audience” gives 94% accuracy.

There will be always a need for experts. However, on some tasks crowds consistently outperform experts.

  • Crowd-creation
    A large diverse crowd beats an expert at generating ideas.
    The crowd has access to more pools of knowledge, more networks, more sources of inspirations. Crowds have more ideas and leads to work with.
  • Crowd-labor
    Who are your global competitors? How do they run their businesses?
    Sure an expert can google thousands of sites in dozens of languages and get you the answers. But a crowd will get you better answers faster.
  • Crowd-prediction
    What’s the best price for a given market? What the best design?
    Ask a crowd and their average prediction will be more accurate than the prediction made by an expert.
  • Crowd-outreach
    Need to find local distributors? Test demand in dozens of new markets?
    Using a crowd to solve your problem is like sending thousands of ants to search for food. If there is something good out there, they will find it.

X-Culture or Other Crowd Platforms?

Crowds need the right process. X-Culture knows process.

There are many crowd-sourcing platforms.
Most of them use a primitive “free-lancer” process.
They broadcast your challenge and hope someone will bring you a good answer.

That’s yesterday. X-Culture uses a better process.

We test dozens of ways to organize a crowd.
We collect tons of data. We constantly experiment.
We constantly improve our crowdsourcing process.

Our crowd members interact.
They compete.
They collaborate.
They borrow ideas.
They build upon ideas of others.
They argue.
They critique.
They learn from one another other.
Then, they take the best ideas and develop them further.

The “free-lancer” crowd is only as smart as the smartest member of the crowd.

The X-Culture crowd develops ideas that even the smartest crowd members could not have developed alone.

The X-Culture process is better.
Our crowd is smarter than other crowds.

More on the science behind X-Culture’s problem solving model here.

How X-Culture Works

A small step for you. A giant leap for your business.

Level 1. Crowd-sourcing

  • You contact us to tell us about your business. We tell you about X-Culture.
  • If we can help, you become an X-Culture partner.
  • When the project starts, we organize one-hour live webinars where you introduce your company and explain what you want our students to work on.
  • Thousands of our students around the world help your business grow:
    they share their creative ideas for your marketing and product design,
    do market research, interview potential customers,
    reach out to local distributors and try to get you contracts in their markets,
    and much more.

Level 2: Expert Reinforcement (Optional)

  • The teams that authored the best ideas collaborate with business professors and experienced consultants.
  • They further develop the ideas and prepare a professional report, strategy, product design, or other requested deliverables.

Level 3. Implementation (Optional)

  • We further strengthen the team with subject experts.
  • They implement the solution and help you take your company to the next level.

Sample Challenges

Over the years, we served more than a hundred companies around the world.

Here are a few examples:

  • Mercedes-Benz: How do we design a truck for developing countries?
  • Home Depot: How do we improve our .com services?
  • Louis Vuitton: Where should we open our next store and what store design would be most appealing to the customers there?
  • Caffè Vergnano: How to build a global coffee house network?
  • Polaris Industries: How to grow the sales of snowmobiles in Asia?
  • Hard Rock International: How do we make our restaurants, hotels and casinos more appealing to young people?

 

We particularly like working with medium and small businesses, companies that already operate in one country and are ready to expand into new markets but need help with market research, market expansion strategy, and business leads.

X-Culture Partnership Inquiry
High-resolution printable pamphlet for businesses PDF