Crowdience

Do what you believe in, work passionately and be patient!

About Crowdience

Crowdience is an online platform that gives ordinary citizens a voice in scientific research. The information citizens provide regarding their own experiences help to keep (medical) science up to date and allow scientists to think and work beyond the current frameworks.

     1.        What is your value proposition?Crowdience is an online platform that gives ordinary citizens a voice in scientific research. The information that citizens provide as experts by experience helps (medical) science to think and work up-to-date and outside the normal framework.Crowdience complies with the following SDG goals: 3: Good health and well-being, 10: Reduce inequality, 11: Sustainable cities and communities and 17: Partnership to achieve goals. 

2.        What is your mission?Crowdience originated from a passion for inclusive healthcare research and the appreciation of everyone’s own ideas and knowledge from their own medical experiences. Everyone is an expert on their own personal health and living situation and can and should therefore be able to contribute [valuable] ideas about healthcare. By involving citizens in healthcare science, we can create much more impact. 

 3.        How did Mercator Launch help you?The Crowdience platform is part of the Crowdience Foundation. We follow the Lean Startup method and Mercator Launch has helped us present our Crowdience platform with more confidence. Entrepreneurs always prefer to present a product that is “complete” and “finished”. And our platform is definitely not finished at all. I came to realize that this is actually very valuable because, in this unfinished stage, we can still get a lot of feedback from users and participants. And that will help us further develop the platform to perfection. Mercator Launch also helped us map our pains and gains and prioritize solutions. In addition, our coaching sessions proved to be very valuable. It’s great to be able to discuss ideas and plans for our business with experienced business coaches. 

4.         What are the future plans for Crowdience?

Currently, we’re working on making the platform more accessible with a subsidy from the SIDN fund. Websites often have complex interfaces and use difficult language. By designing a platform that way, a lot of people will refrain from using it. That’s why we are making our platform accessible with people who are somewhat limited in their knowledge about and use of the internet and websites, to prevent “web inequality” as a reason that people can’t use our platform. After completing this process, the platform will be used to research the impact of the Corona measures on long-term care for seniors and people with a (intellectual) disability. The fact that we’re able to do this is a dream come true. But our goals reach further than that. When we talk about accessibility of the platform, it does not only apply to citizens. We would like to make the platform attractive and easy to use for researchers as well, including those with the smallest budget.

     5.      What do you need to make this happen?

To do this, we need the passion and confidence of other researchers, who want to further develop and expand the platform with us. To be able to reach those researchers we’re looking for people who can help us with research, marketing and communication.

6.        If you can give one piece of advice to future entrepreneurs, what would it be?

Do what you believe in, work passionately and be patient!

Visit their website here: https://crowdience.nl/