Jovoto: Bringing Crowdsourcing & Co-Creation Together

            While scavenging the internet for good examples of collective action, I was fortunate enough to come across a website that is reinventing the relationship between customers and corporations. The website is called jovoto (http://www.jovoto.com/). To start, I will provide a brief explanation of the function of the website, and the objectives of the site’s operations.

Jovoto describes itself as “a work environment, connecting creative talent and brands the fair way.” Potential clients, mainly large brands and organizations, come to the permanently employed creative strategists at jovoto with a set of needs for new ideas. The creative strategists work with the client initially to help frame these needs to acclimate them to the creative talent community that visit jovoto online. This is where the collective action begins! Anyone visiting jovoto can submit their ideas to a client’s project posting on the site. Each submission can be improved and modified based on recommendations and discussions with other jovoto users and submitters. Each user can gain recognition on the site for historically submitting engaging professional ideas that progressively answer the client’s set of needs. Each individual is allowed to vote on who wins the prize money that is attached to each client posting, which can be upwards of $30,000.One interesting feature I noticed was that no matter the outcome of the collaborative process or idea selection, the submitting user keeps the rights to their idea. If the client wishes to use a submitted idea, they must work out a deal with the jovoto user who gave them the insight. The clients ultimately gain tons of submissions with unique ideas that help solve their problems, while simultaneously collecting user perception for their service systems and product assortments.

            Upon my analysis of jovoto, I was thoroughly impressed by the ingenuity of the website’s founders and community. I classified this example of collective action as both “crowdsourcing” and “co-creation”. Jovoto is an illustration of crowdsourcing, because the corporate brands are soliciting ideas from a large community of online users. Additionally, co-creation came to mind, because each individual idea posted to a client’s submission page can be shared, combined, and retooled by others in the community to create the best idea possible.

            The objective of jovoto is to bring brands and an online creative community together under a format that serves the greatest good of all parties involved. Clearly, the corporations posting idea requests benefit from the wide variety of novel submission they receive. Similarly, the creative users are benefitting from jovoto by utilizing an online forum that lets them connect with fellow creative minds, while fairly competing for the chance to earn prize money and possibly win contracts with clients. Jovoto is rooted in the open online community philosophy that has contributed to many organizations’ successes throughout the technological era. By way of my study and genuine intrigue into jovoto, I conclude that the website provides beneficial avenues for the success of both the site’s online clients and creative users. Jovoto is one of the many ingenious sites driving collective action into the way individuals and groups create things in the present and will develop ideas for the future.