A crowdsourcing model for new idea development in the fashion industry

Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool for new product development; companies create online platforms where customers can contribute their own ideas to design tasks, often motivated by either a monetary prize or gaining social status. The phenomenon can help companies gain significant competitive advantage due to e.g. reduced R&D costs and increased customer satisfaction, but to be successful, crowdsourcing needs to be implemented efficiently. The crowdsourcing platform and the practices related to it need to be built to enable effective data management and evaluation. Fashion is a very promising area for crowdsourcing due to its rapidly evolving nature. Styles can change overnight, which means that brands need to rely more and more on the knowledge of their customers to be able to provide them with the newest trends. This article first provides an overview on current crowdsourcing practices and crowdsourcing platforms used by companies in general, and then discusses special requirements that the fashion industry sets for crowdsourcing practices and crowdsourcing platforms. At the end, the article presents a new model of crowdsourcing processes that are especially suitable for the fashion industry in the design phase of new fashion garments.