Crowd Engineering Platform: Functions Supporting Co-creation in Product Development

Digital collaboration in all sectors of industry is on the rise, also driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. People centricity, location independence and resilient delivery are important trends in this regard. Crowd engineering is a possible solution to address the challenges posed by these trends. This paper provides an insight about a technological approach for a platform for community-based product engineering. The platform consists of different cornerstones to ensure flexibility towards users, open interfaces and transparency to support re-use of existing project results. As different users have different requirements, companies have over time grown an IT infrastructure serving their needs best. Prosumers, i.e. consumers which are involved in the production of the respective products, have a limited set of digital tools allowing them to contribute to product creation. A suitable platform should be able to integrate different approaches and data from various digital tools. Rather than being monolithic, an appropriate platform needs to be a hub for core data and functionalities to support secure and reliable collaboration between all involved actors, corporate or private. These active users will be organized in a virtual community to create an attractive platform for the exchange of ideas, concepts and realizations for technical solutions by developers. The paper will introduce a possible platform structure where personal data, project related data, development data, technical product descriptions and community interactions are combined. A common access point allows an aggregation of touchpoints without centralization. Apart from the examination of technical and structural aspects of such a platform, approaches for a possible operator model are discussed. In addition to providing technically required functions, a lively community is an important basis for successful crowd engineering. Therefore, this paper will examine both community building and the implementation of co-creation projects, as they are necessary to operate the crowd engineering platform economically. Finally, different potential further advancement of the Crowd Engineering platform shall be discussed. This focuses on technological solutions that support users or serve certain tasks.