Crowd Sourcing

Figure 6: Crowd sourcing

Crowd sourcing is the process of inviting input from a large group of people, usually on the internet. It reaches the expertise of the broader scientific community. A company can use this model to gather ideas for specific research questions. The benefits of this are:

• Low bureaucratic hurdles, i.e., less administration.
• Short response times.
• A clearly defined intellectual property (IP) policy.

Under this model, grants are awarded to relevant research; the IP rights may remain completely with the applicant during this phase. If the funded research leads to promising results, this may be followed by individual collaboration agreements.