Exploring the Potential of Children in Crowdsourcing

Recently, companies and academia have turned to crowdsourcing to stimulate creativity and innovation. Although children's creative nature has been well documented in the design process in co-creation for new products and/or services, this has not yet extended to crowdsourcing. With this paper, we investigate -- through crowdsourcing -- the gap between children and crowdsourcing. To gather a diverse sample of participants we used CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing platform, to generate, evaluate and rank ideas and concepts. Results show that 93% of parents and 80% of non-parents would involve children in crowdsourcing. The most valued concept of the crowd was the collaboration between parents and children, who are innovating for companies. This concept involves publishing companies requesting drawings from children for book illustrations.