The concept of crowdsourcing feedback to replace more traditional R&D is relatively new. While it can be challenging to implement, understanding how crowdsourcing feedback can help your organization specifically can be incredibly beneficial. No one would think twice about asking several friends to recommend a professional they trust before committing to a new provider. Applying this idea to a new business model is also an effective way of compiling feedback and learning from other people’s input.
If you have a healthcare startup company you’re looking to kick-start, you can collect pros and cons and thoughts you may have yet to consider or generate even bigger and better ideas with crowdsourced feedback. After all, if huge companies like Starbucks and Coca-Cola can lean on crowdsourcing to spark new product ideas or uncover solutions, why wouldn’t it work for your startup too?
Here are some advantages of using crowdsourced feedback for your business and how it can help define and finesse your concept, processes, and value proposition before jumping into the funding process.
What is Crowdsourced Feedback in Business?
As an internet user in 2022, you may have come across the words crowdsourcing or crowdfunding. While both words share some similarities, they are distinct. While crowdfunding refers to seeking funds from investors, family, friends, or fans, crowdsourcing refers to acquiring information, ideas, opinions, services, or funds from a group of people.
In business, crowdsourced feedback refers to a strategy that involves collecting information from a selected group of people (mainly industry experts and professionals). This process has a purpose: to help you improve and finesse your ideas and make them sellable.
As a startup healthcare company, an idea made in isolation may be a recipe for premature failure. Crowdsourcing is the way to go, and here is why it can be invaluable:
Complete Ideological Overhaul
Businesses centered around innovative health technologies are complex structures that require careful consideration, care, and precise professional planning and execution. The reason is that this industry is heavily regulated, and rightfully so –after all, we’re dealing with human lives.
Crowdsourcing feedback on your concept, processes, and value proposition can help you see your business from different perspectives and allow you to make more client or patient-facing informed decisions in favor of it.
A New and Fresh Perspective
You’ve probably worked on your pitch and concept day in and day out, and you’re all slightly biased toward your company. Unlike your team, the crowd will bring a new perspective with their fresh eyes. They can find the piece you still need to include, enrich your idea, and help you offer even more comprehensive solutions.
A diverse crowd, with individuals from different countries, socioeconomic backgrounds, experiences, and expertise, can add worldviews you don’t have. Crowdsourcing feedback for healthcare startups with a diverse group can be a crucial learning opportunity for your organization to drive innovation and inclusion.
Building customer contacts and database
Crowdsourced feedback for startup healthcare companies helps you gain several potential customer contacts in your database –after all, you are dealing with a crowd. There is nothing wrong with using this as an opportunity to build on your brand and start networking and collecting valuable contacts.
For everyone who receives and reads your survey material, you’ve gained one potential customer, investor, or loyal fan. This way, you have a minor customer base after you’ve put your house in order.
It Saves Time and Money
Regardless of the mission of your innovative healthcare company, every business has to keep its bottom line in mind. How can you provide health and innovation if you can’t stay in business?
Hiring a team of experts to conduct a study can be seriously cost-intensive. You would have to cover wages, provide a space, offer insurance, and other costs. Crowdsourcing allows you to cover grounds faster, reducing costs and using your time more efficiently. In addition, a crowdsourcing platform focusing on healthcare innovation can help advance your project through the power of the crowd – connecting physicians and patients with ideas.
High Success Rate
Implementing the learnings you acquired through crowdsourced feedback increases the possibility of success for startup healthcare companies or any company for that matter. When you weigh and analyze the opinions of thousands of individuals worldwide, you’ll increase the sellability of your business venture. What’s more, while working on your business idea, new innovative thoughts can spring up elsewhere, leaving you with more potential products or solutions to offer.
Cons of Crowdsourcing for Startup healthcare companies
Crowdsourcing is not all fun and games; neither is it a walk-over for business ventures. There are a few downsides to note when considering this option.
Image/Ideological Loss
Because of the complex nature of innovative health technologies, the risk of image or idea theft is very high. When your idea falls into the hands of several professionals, especially within your same field, natural risks are involved, and other individuals might map out a strategy to utilize your idea.
But this has an easy fix; ensure you have strategies to prevent theft and plagiarism and defend your intellectual property by implementing NDA agreements and other carefully articulated privacy policies.
Derailment
When not conducted correctly or outside an industry-specific platform, crowdsourcing contestants can submit whatever comes to their minds when prompted for answers. It is always possible someone is not an expert in your field. A poor-quality crowdsourcing exercise can leave you with many off-target suggestions and feedback. Contestants could be unprofessional or lead you in a foolish direction because they don’t know the business’s landscape.
How to Get it Right
After learning what crowdsourced feedback is, and some pros & cons, the main question is, how can you perfect your business idea with crowdsourced feedback? Here are five tips to perfect your business with crowdsourced feedback:
Define your Audiences
Carefully select the category of people and professionals who get your content and survey materials. This will help you keep the outcome of the exercise as valid and relevant as possible.
Analyze Results: Have a Trusted Team for Feedback Sorting
A single individual cannot effectively run a startup healthcare company. Instead, rely on a team of professionals you can trust. They can sort out the information provided, crunch the data and draw reasonable conclusions.
Don’t Throw All Your Eggs in one Basket
When working on innovative health technologies, you must apply wisdom in selecting the information you allow into the public space. You should only put out information that is not top-tier sensitive in the eyes of your business.
Protect your Intellectual Property
All respondents should sign non-disclosure agreements prepared by your legal counsel, who will best advise you on the specifications.
Implement Results Judiciously
The feedback gotten should not be swept under the rug. You need all the help you can get, and using all this fresh feedback to inform your concept will be crucial in building an innovative healthcare company.
Choose a safe way to get crowdsourced feedback
Connect with emerging companies, and seek industry and relevant input, validation, commentary, and partnerships. Add your voice to the wisdom of the crowd. By joining an industry-specific community like RedCrow, you can trust that the crowdsourcing feedback will be in the hands of professionals who can enlist verified healthcare enthusiasts and investors to inform your project.
Harnessing the collective professional inputs of thousands of experts worldwide may be the perfect business strategy for startup healthcare companies hoping to work on innovative health technologies. The rapid changes in the industry make it difficult for startups to make reasonable progress independently; however, a group of like-minded experts can achieve much more.
Redcrow offers an all-in-one ecosystem of healthcare professionals to help you take giant steps with our community. Whether it’s feedback, investment or partnerships, join RedCrow to engage, network, invest, and grow!
