Turning to the crowd for innovative insights is far from a new concept.  Innocentive has been providing an ideas marketplace for many years now, whilst organisations are increasingly tapping into insights from their employees for strategy and business planning.

A new site is aiming to provide a similar level of crowdsourced insights to small and medium enterprises around the world.  The site, called CrowdAdviser, is due to launch in beta mode this October, but is accepting registrations from this week.

The site aims to offer small companies access to the same level of insight and expertise as those now commonly tapped into by their larger peers.  So, for instance, if you’re looking to launch a new product, Crowd Adviser can let you tap into the crowd for market research into your new idea.

The site will offer three forms of engagement with the crowd:

• Ideas
• Opinions
• Votes

Companies can define the various characteristics they wish to employ for their challenge, be that the type of participant they wish to involve, the time frame of the challenge and of course the remuneration they wish to offer participants.

As the site is still in private mode at the moment, it very much sits in the ‘wait and see’ box, but if you like the idea of crowdsourcing, there are a couple of posts you should read before getting started, including:

• why people should take part in your crowdsourcing
• the role of the community manager in crowdsourcing
• the importance of the brief
• the intellectual property of crowdsourcing
• the crowdsourced customer journey
• what can crowdsourcing do for you