Crowdsourcing Definition #2: What is Group Think (and how to avoid it)?

Here’s a question just in to us that we hear all the time “How do you deal with the loud talker problem? You know, the people that just like to talk and talk in an online community and can skew the impression of a need. It’s the same problem that you get when you do a focus group.”

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You can have a community that never goes near crowdsourcing, but you’ll have a difficult time crowdsourcing without a community. So what’s the difference?

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First, open your kimono

The Xprize incentive 2 innovate conference was this week in New York, with Don Tapscott and Reid Hoffman among the speakers. Companies like Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble as well as well as Unicef, USAID and the US Department of Energy were in attendance – all looking to better understand the future of open innovation and how to apply it as leaders.
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For a business shift that’s about inviting in non-experts, hobbyists and hackers, there’s a lot of insider lingo around crowdsourcing. This begins the first of a series of straight talk on crowdsourcing principles to help us all put the theory into practice.

What is collective intelligence? Jeff Howe, the guy that came up with the term crowdsourcing, says it this way, “A central principle animating crowdsourcing is that the group contains more knowledge than individuals.” James Suroweicki says, “Even if most of the people within a group are not especially well-informed or rational, it can still reach a collectively wise decision.” This is the science that explains why when asked for a lifeline on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the crowd guesses 91% correctly, whereas experts have a 61% likelihood of getting the right answer. The answers that come from crowdsourcing are called collective intelligence or wisdom of crowds. Yes, two terms for the same thing.
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