Crowdsourcing for Engineering Systems Design – Research Seminar by Dr. Jitesh Panchal (Purdue University, USA)
On the 21st of November, Industrial Designe welcomed Dr. Jitesh Panchal, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University in the US, for a 3-day research visit to the Division.
Dr. Panchal is an internationally renowned expert for Collective Innovation and Open Source Product Development. As part of his visit, he delivered a seminar on Designing Crowdsourcing Contests for Engineering Systems Design:
“Crowdsourcing is attractive for product development organizations because of various benefits, including access to a broad pool of solvers, increased capacity of idea generation through open innovation, and the opportunity for cost savings because payments are made only after solutions are obtained. While the advantages of crowdsourcing are clear, the effectiveness of running a design competition significantly depends on the specific design of the crowdsourcing contest. Contest design decisions influence the participants’ decisions including whether to participate or not, and how much effort to invest in the tournament. These decisions affect the likelihood of achieving good solutions, which is an important aspect of the outcomes of crowdsourcing contests. In this talk, I will discuss our ongoing efforts towards a systematic, theory-driven analytical approach backed by experimental and field data for establishing a rigorous and holistic framework for understanding crowdsourcing within engineering systems design. I will discuss the characteristics of engineering design problems, which result in unique challenges in applying crowdsourcing to engineering design, and potential ways for addressing the challenges.”
At the end of the presentation, Guangxiao (Rain) Hu awarded Dr. Panchal a certificate of appreciation on behalf of the Industrial Design Society.
Throughout his vist, Dr. Panchal engaged in a number of meetings with other researchers from Industrial Design to further their collaboration on projects in the context of Social Product Development (SPD) aimed at fostering the democratization of design and innovation.
Members of Industrial Design are planning to visit Dr Panchal’s Design Engineering Laboratory at Purdue sometime in the spring of 2019.