IBM takes Crowdsourcing to the next level with its Real Time Translation Project

If you thought crowdsourcing only worked for creating marketing/design campaigns and soliciting community feedback, think again? IBM is changing that and taking crowdsourcing to the next level with its latest project. Christened N.Fluent , the project is a text translation based project which has been internally crowdsourced among IBM employees.The project is currently used company’s employees to translate electronic documents – including web pages and instant messages – between English and Arabic, Chinese , French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

It is aimed at utilizing a global workforce to collaborate together and increase the business and technology specific vocabulary.

With its 400,000-member work force spread across more than 170 countries, IBM is definitely in a good position to leverage the power of crowd,even though the crowd is internal as of now.

IBM initiated the project by issuing a “worldwide translation challenge” to its employees, using a points-based system to award the biggest contributors prizes that were converted to charitable donations. The project saw enormous response and a databank of 1.3 million words were collected over a 2 week period.

I have previously discussed how crowdsourcing can provide the winning edge.The initiative by IBM proves a testimony to that effect.Even though the project is for internal use right, the company has plans to launch N.Fluent as a product in due course of time. IBM has been upbeat about text translation ever since it identified real time translation as an emerging trend.

CrowdSourcing has all the ingredients of becoming the perfect innovation engine for organizations small and large. Be it via listening to the community problems to come up with new problem solvers or by listening to the existing customer base to innovate and delight the customer. But, then like everything else it is the execution of a crowdsourcing initiative that makes all the difference. A crowdsourced initiative in itself without a clear identification of the targeted collaborators and deliverables can be futile which was evident in DGCA’s ill-executed attempt.

In the case of IBM and its crowdsourced translation project , the pre-requisites and the goals were clearly aligned to make it a successful project.

• A highly specialized & knowledgeable crowd(workforce) – Who better then its internal employees to decipher and translate company specific business and technology specific vocabulary.
• A perfect choice of project – Is the initiative or the deliverable worth throwing for collective collaboration? IBM got it right with its translation project.With a project like real-time translation what could work better than the power of a regionally diversified workforce(crowd)
• A clear vision of the outcome – Now, this is a no-brainer. Without a clear vision of what to expect , crowdsourcing won’t bear much fruit. IBM aligned the initiative with its long term vision of working on a key emerging business trend. The exercise could provide IBM with a viable business product.

In the discussions on Crowdsourcing , the question always boils down to the restricted business areas where crowd sourcing can be applied and its use being limited to small organizations. But, Internet Start-ups are using it to good effect and Unilever used it to good effect for its marketing campaign and now IBM is taking it a step further.

What do you think? Has the time come for organizations to think of Crowdsourcing as an effective tool and make it a part of the organization DNA to foster change and innovation.