Competing on an Absolute Basis
I recently had the opportunity to participate in the crowdsourcing of a logo design using crowdspring. If you’re not familiar with it, check it out, but crowdspring allows you to create a competition for designing logos, web sites, and other creative needs. Then people can submit their creations, and people can vote on them. You choose the one you like and pay the reward. This reward is on an absolute basis. It is paid in dollars regardless of where the person lives in the global society. Clearly, this is an amazing opportunity for all the freelance designers out there, but a comment last night got me thinking–$200 is not bad if you are in the US, but what does that mean if you are in Mexico or India? Let’s go even further–what is that if you are in Africa?
The economics are intriguing. Lets say you are in the US, where the median income in 2006 (acc. to finfacts) was approximately $50,000. The typical logo competition in crowdspring seems to be about $200 (just a ballpark). To make a living, you have to win 250 competitions. That’s about 21 per month, or pretty much 1 every business day. Are you that good? Really? Now, let’s consider the impact of giving every child a laptop in Africa and a child learns graphic design. This child live in Nigeria where the average income is $640 per year (same source). They have to win 4 competitions, or one every three months. Now our US specialist can only afford to spend at most one day working on each design, while our Nigerian contestant can afford to spend every day for the duration of the competition (seems to be an average of about 15 days) on her design.
Clearly I am painting a simpler picture here, but the point is still valid. In order to meet our high expectations of income and wealth in this brave new world, workers in the developed countries have to be the best they can be in order to maintain their standard of living. And the door is open for wealth creation in poorer countries more so than I ever thought imaginable. I might send a development project to India for work, but I have relationships there, and I have developed a level of trust. I wouldn’t think to send a project to Nigeria, but if that young aspiring designer in Africa creates the best design, I really don’t care where she is living.
I realize similar points have been made by Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, and others, but I really had not seen such a shining example of how this can play out at an individual level until I thought about crowdspring. And what strikes me most of all is that this is a somewhat simple application of the concept of global crowdsourcing. Creative design is somewhat unique in that the deliverable is well -defined and it can be completed–it does not require an ongoing relationship or any significant expectation of sensitive private information.
If you can crowdsource creative design, what’s next? What are some of the careers and skills that are ripe for this type of global competition at an individual level and on an absolute basis? As you go off to start your own business or freelance, have you considered how good you are not just in your city, state, region, or country, but how good you are at the globally competitive level?
