Member Article

Using kid-sourcing to benefit your business

Crowdsourcing has proved itself as a useful business tool in the digital age – enabling business of all sizes to gather ideas in both a cost and time effective manner. But while crowdsourcing became an established choice many years ago, One Third Stories – a new series of paperback storybooks, audiobooks and activity materials designed to introduce children to foreign languages – is going one step further and shaking up traditional business models by kid-sourcing its ideas.

One Third Stories’ first book was launched last year after it crowdsourced ideas from over 1,500 children. Working with teachers, the co-founders launched a competition where children wrote their own short stories and illustrations using French, Spanish, Italian and German words, which inspired events and characters in the published book.

Alex Somervell, co-founder of One Third Stories says: “When we started One Third Stories, we wanted to create a ‘hidden vegetables’ approach to language learning, where children would fall in love with foreign languages through books that they were genuinely excited to read. We had our own ideas around this but rather than simply going ahead with these ideas, we wanted to see what our target audience had to say. We had the general concept of a little girl who had lost her words and then invited children to provide ideas on who and what this little girl encountered on her quest to find her words. We couldn’t have hoped for more creative, inspiring, enjoyable and humorous ideas from the responses we received and those children whose ideas were included in the first story became published authors.

“We’re obviously aimed at children so it makes sense for us to adopt a kid-sourcing model, but having seen what we gained from this approach, we believe that all new businesses could benefit from using the ideas and imagination of their target audience, as they ultimately know best.

“Kid-sourcing ideas opens start-ups to a new way of thinking without any boundaries or pre-formed conceptions which is hugely important for any new business, but often difficult to achieve due to how ingrained you become in your business.

“We’d encourage any new business to give kid-sourcing a go if relevant because ultimately, there’s nothing to lose – if you end up not quite getting useful ideas out of it, you may find yourself inspired and you will have certainly inspired children too.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Alex Somervell .