The power of the crowd and how it shapes business: According to the book, the first recorded instance of crowdsourcing is the 1714 British government offering of 20,000 pounds (roughly $12 million today) to anyone who could invent a way to determine longitude on a sailing vessel. The solution a clock that operates with superb accuracy, even during the rigors of an overseas voyage was developed by John Harrison, an uneducated cabinetmaker from Yorkshire. A modern example might be: WellPoint, X Prize launch $10M health care contest (this was not part of the book). The book reminds us that when you mine the crowd you will often find the best ideas and approaches from those that do not have a specialty in the field in which they solve a problem. The authors tips for applying crowdsourcing:
Crowd creation (outsourcing)
Crowd voting
Crowd funding (example, sellaband.com)
Offer the right incentives (people need to feel rewarded for their efforts, even if the money is a token amount)
Keep the pink slips in the drawer
The dumbness of crowds, or the benevolent dictator principle
Keep it simple and break it down (divide tasks into the smallest possible components)
Remember Sturgeons Law (90 percent of everything is crap some would say this is a low ball figure I agree) Crowdsourcings chief merit lies in providing a previously nonexistent outlet for talent.
Remember the ten percent, the antidote to Sturgeons Law: Provide a venue no aptitude or ability required, then let the crowd sort it out.
The communitys always right. You can attempt to guide the community but ultimately you will follow them.
Ask not what the crowd can do for you, but what you can do for the crowd. Crowdsourcing works best when an individual or company gives the crowd something it wants. Satisfy the upper most tier of hierarchy of needs people are drawn to participate because some psychological, or emotional need is being met.
The book discusses the evolution of Wikipedia from the perspective of its founders. And although interesting, Im going to present an additional example, not from the book, but also an example of community organization: Freebase, a flexible underlying structure that is very different from conventional databases that use rigid organizational structures, or schema, to organize information. Freebases open, wiki-like approach to information organization means that Freebase can grow without formal, centralized planning. As a result, anyone can contribute information about their areas of interest, create new schemas to organize information, or build collections of topics that reveal new, interesting, and fun relationships among their subjects.In terms of taking the crowdsourcing dynamic and integrating into an enterprise, although not mentioned in the book, an offering called Spigit seems to integrate the components necessary to rollout and maintain such an organization/corporate initiative. Spigit uses social collaboration for measuring social interactions in on-line communities to identify quality content as well as key influencers. Businesses can use Spigits smart, social collaboration platform to discover key influencers within their organization, engage employees and innovative ideas into real solutions.