The recent coverage of the $1 million
There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.
What really happens in crowdsourcing as it is practiced in wide variety of contexts, from Wikipedia to open source to scientific research, is that a problem is broadcast to a large number of people with varying forms of expertise. Then individuals motivated by obsession, competition, money or all three apply their individual talent to creating a solution.
Just look at the successes of crowdsourcing to see how the crowd is an illusion.
Wikipedia seems like a good example of a crowd of people who have created a great resource. But at a conference last year I asked Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about how articles were created. He said that the vast majority are the product of a motivated individual. After articles are created, they are curated--corrected, improved and extended--by many different people. Some articles are indeed group creations that evolved out of a sentence or two. But if you took away all of the articles that were individual creations, Wikipedia would have very little left.
Open-source developers are often mentioned as a crowd of motivated programmers ready to meet the world's software needs. A lot of wishful thinkers love to put forth the notion that all large software companies should be quaking in their boots because a crowd of open-source developers is ready to eat their lunch and create software for any purpose.
There is no crowd of open-source developers ready to attack every problem. In fact, most open-source projects are the product of one obsessed individual who wrote the software to meet his own needs. Often this individual was joined by other programmers who shared the founder's vision and, under his direction, created great software. Yes, there are large teams of developers on open-source projects, but without the virtuoso contribution at the outset, they would achieve nothing. In a clear indication of the lasting importance of the role of the founding virtuoso, Linus Torvalds' absence from a list of the Linux kernel contributors made headlines in April.
Virtually all large projects, especially Linux, are dominated by programmers who are paid to work on the project because it benefits their corporate employers. (See "Commercial Bear Hug of Open Source.") Such structures are consortiums like the impromptu assembly of
The Netflix contest is a prime example of individual virtuosity at work. One team was clearly in the lead and then a consortium of teams that had worse performance joined together and combined their innovations to create an algorithm that won the contest. For most of the contest, individuals toiled to figure out a solution. At the end, a consortium was formed. None of the invention happened through a crowd. (See "The Netflix R&D Game.")
So what's my problem? Why does it bug me that people think crowdsourcing is something it is not? Why do I care that people think a crowd is capable of individual virtuosity? What bugs me is that misplaced faith in the crowd is a blow to the image of the heroic inventor. We need to nurture and fund inventors and give them time to explore, play and fail. A false idea of the crowd reduces the motivation for this investment, with the supposition that companies can tap the minds of inventors on the cheap.
Does crowdsourcing exist as it is popularly conceived? Yes, it does, but it doesn't have anything to do with innovation. Jigsaw, the community-created database of 16 million business contacts, is crowdsourcing. Tens of thousands of people have added business contacts to Jigsaw's database so they can earn points and get access to business contacts entered by others. Jigsaw sells this data to companies, generating millions in revenue. Jigsaw is the only true crowdsourced business I know of. The other businesses mentioned in the crowdsourcing category, Innocentive, Threadless, Spreadshirt, iStockPhoto, are really versions of Wikipedia, that is, aggregations of the inventions of individual virtuosos. Other large projects, like Linux,
Karim R. Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, calls what most people refer to as crowdsourcing "broadcast search." A problem statement is broadcast along with associated incentives, and people with expertise apply their talent to solving the problem. I like the term virtuoso search better. Whatever term we use, let's not call it crowdsourcing and pretend that 10,000 average Joes invent better products than Steve Jobs.
Dan Woods is chief technology officer and editor of Evolved Technologist, a research firm focused on the needs of CTOs and chief information officers. He consults for many of the other companies he writes about. For more information, go to www.evolvedtechnologist.com.
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