Before finally making a purchase or carrying out a decision, most individuals need to answer a long series of questions satisfactorily. These may include:

• what are the available options?
• what things do I need to do achieve my desired outcome?
•  how to do x or y?
• what are the hidden pitfalls that I ought to be aware of?
• who can I trust?
• which is better for somebody in my circumstances, option A or option B?

Often, our inability to answer such questions satisfactorily is the cause of great anxiety, of mistakes (bad decisions) or simple inaction ('given that I can't answer this question, I won't go any further'). Yet, currently, there are very few sources of trustworthy, expert, customized advice that ordinary individuals can afford.

Problem Solving Communities help individuals overcome this problem by collecting the answers other people have discovered and making them available to the individual, thereby helping him avoid the need to reinvent the wheel. By answering the questions users ask – and storing the answers for re-use the next time somebody asks the same question –  Problem Solving Communities bring economies of scale to personal decision making. For example, if it costs £100 to research and formulate a good answer to a certain question and the answer is used only once, then it adds £100 to the cost of the product or service (or solution) in question. However, if the same answer is used 1000 times over, the unit cost of the answer falls from £100 to £0.1: a massive productivity boost.

Business case, for individuals

PSCs slash the costs of making better decisions. They also help individuals avoid the costs and pitfalls of making bad decisions.

Business case, for organizations

PSCs offer suppliers three potentially significant benefits:

• they can significantly reduce the cost of serving customers who are ignorant or confused, while significantly improving customers' experience of their product or service (because the customer's question is answered properly)
• they can open up growth in new markets held back by customer ignorance, confusion, doubt or anxiety (because answering their questions builds confidence and trust, and creates a datastore or repository of valuable information)
• they provide companies with a real time insight into the issues that really matter to their customers right now, thereby helping companies reallocate resources from less value adding activities to more value-adding ones.

Necessary infrastructure

PSCs are a product of the digital age: the ability to elicit questions (often in digital form), search for existing research answers including slicing and dicing existing knowledge bases, the ability to store data at low cost, and to make this data available to users at low cost. Without infrastructure in all four areas (efficient input of questions, efficient search, efficient data storage, efficient data output), PSCs would not be possible.

For more detail on Problem Solving Communities, see the White Paper.