The Digital Revolution has placed the customer at the center. A company that responded to the Digital Revolution is Braineet. Braineet launched in 2014 and it is an innovative crowdsourcing platform. Braineet allows consumers and employees to share their ideas with brands. Thereby, the platform bridges the gap between consumers and companies and facilitate companies to improve the quality of its products and services.
Figure 1: How does Braineet works?
Braineet is available on the web, tablet and mobile app (Android & iOS) and offers members of the platform the opportunity to share ideas. Ideas can be posted independently by the user or by participating in Challenges of a brand (figure 1). These Challenges enables every member of the Braineet community to compete to win prizes and promote their best ideas. Each idea can be up to 140 characters. Users of Braineet can like and promote each other’s ideas in order to show their appreciation for the content of the idea. Subsequently, users can interact with the brand throughout the development process until the ideas have been realized.
Figure 2: Opinions of companies regarding Braineet
More than 100 brands have interacted with their customers via Braineet, including Nespresso, Taco Bell USA, AX, Dove. From figure 2, it can be concluded that companies are quite optimistic about Braineet. Companies are motivated to utilize Braineet because they want to solve problems, generate ideas and outsource tasks (Tsekouras, lecture 3). But why do firms want to delegate innovation to users? One of the reasons is that it is quite costly to obtain detailed consumer information (Tsekouras, lecture 3). Through Braineet, companies have direct insight on the preferences of the consumer regarding their products and services. Furthermore, the platform enables the firms to have interaction with customers and employees.
On the other hand, consumers prefer to be active on Braineet due to the feeling of glory, the possibility of improving products/services according to their own wishes and/or the monetary rewards that they receive from brands (Tsekouras, lecture 3; Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2013). The greater the size of the crowd, the greater the possibility of idea diversity put forth by the crowd (Boundreau, 2012). Tens of thousands of ideas have been shared from more than 160 countries on Braineet. However, the large quantity of ideas doesn’t necessarily means that the quality of the ideas is high. The crowd often fails to offer well-considered solutions that incorporate multiple perspectives, risks and needs (Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2013). User ideas score high in terms of novel and customer benefits, but lower in terms of feasibility as the crowd are not always experts in the fields (Poetz & Schreirer, 2012). Braineet tries to overcome this issue by also offering employees the possibility to share their ideas for products/services. Employees namely have knowledge about the culture of the company and are experts in the field, so their ideas will definitely be more feasible. The downside of Braineet is the 140 words limit that makes it difficult for companies to understand complicated ideas. Consequently, it is harder for the company to integrate multiple ideas into a more integrated solution (Fuller et al., 2007).
The efficiency of the business model of Braineet can be assessed in the following way.
Firstly, there are moderate switching costs as consumers and companies can both choose to be active on other crowdsourcing platforms to maximize their value. For companies, this decision will depend on the quality and quantity of members of the community. Larger communities may result in more ideas whereas a community with more experts will result in more feasible ideas. For consumers, this decision depends e.g. on the brands that are active on certain platforms. When Braineet doesn’t facilitate their favorite brand, they might search for other platforms that do so.
Secondly, the protection from the competition is moderate. There are other competitors active in the market that provides the same services as Braineet, for example IdeaScale and Seezers. However, more than 100 brands used Braineet and Braineet includes success quotes of these companies on the website. Companies then tend to prefer Braineet over other platforms due to this experience factor.
Thirdly, the business model of Braineet is highly profitable due to the growing community and effective partnerships. Braineet worked with Microsoft GTM services during the past two years and that enabled Braineet to grow a larger base of enterprise clients and to double its revenue. Braineet namely benefits from Microsoft’s unique network and expertise in the B2B software landscape. Moreover, due to the partnership, Braineet runs on Microsoft Azure and integrates with Office 365 and Yammer. This is an unique feature compared to the competition of Braineet (IdeaScale/Seezers)
Lastly, the business model of Braineet is highly scalable. Braineet has no inventory and the company requires few capital investment to serve a growing consumer base.
In conclusion, Braineet has good future prospects and it is an excellent response to the Digital Age where business models are more consumer-centric. Would you participate on Braineet?
References:
https://partner.microsoft.com/el-gr/case-studies/braineet
https://blog.braineet.com/en/about-braineet/
Boudreau, K.J., (2012.) Let a thousand flowers bloom? An early look at large numbers of software app developers and patterns of innovation. Organization Science, 23(5), 1409–1427.
Füller, J., Jawecki, G., Mühlbacher, H., 2007. Innovation creation by online basketball communities. Journal of Business Research, 60(1), 60–71.
Majchrzak, A., & Malhotra, A. (2013). Towards an information systems perspective and research agenda on crowdsourcing for innovation. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 22(4), 257-268.
Boudreau, K.J., (2012.) Let a thousand flowers bloom? An early look at large numbers of software app developers and patterns of innovation. Organization Science, 23(5), 1409–1427.
Poetz, M. K., & Schreier, M. (2012). The value of crowdsourcing: can users really compete with professionals in generating new product ideas?. Journal of product innovation management, 29(2), 245-256.
Consumer Value Creation 