Jeff Howe on Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing" has, virtually overnight, generated huge buzz, enthusiasm, and fear. It's the application of the open-source idea to any field outside of software, taking a function performed by people in an organization, such as reporting done by journalists, research and product development by scientists, or design of a T-shirt, for example, and, in effect, "outsourcing" it through an open-air broadcast on the Internet. Crowdsourcing has already had a huge impact on big companies like Procter & Gamble, as well as start-ups like Threadless.com, which rapidly became the third largest T-shirt maker in the United States. The fuel sparking the crowdsourcing flame is the potent combination of more highly educated people working in fields other than those in which they were trained (think of the art historian peddling financial advice at Merrill Lynch) with the greatest mechanism for distributing knowledge and information the world has ever seen: the Internet.

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Tags: crowdsourcing, innovation, internet
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2 Comments

Comment by Alan Headbloom on March 25, 2009 at 10:55pm: This is a huge paradigm shift, and one which seems more intuitively "logical" to Gen X or Y than older folks. I look forward to hearing about how this makes sense from other community members.

Comment by Kevin Morales on March 25, 2009 at 9:11pm: In this video, Jeff Howe is proposing the notion that the internet's "virtual crowd" is a much greater force for creative production than corporations or businesses. How have you seen internet based initiatives affect your work? What can you learn from these effects to improve your work or make it more agile?