In this week’s column, The Jargon Spy, Dan Woods says that crowdsourcing is an illusion and that only individuals are innovative. He believes that by putting trust in the crowd, we are tearing down the ideal of the heroic inventor.
I understand Dan Wood’s underlying concerns. He says, “We need to nurture and fund inventors and give them time to explore, play and fail.” As an entrepreneur, I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, he seems to be confusing those concerns with an incorrect definition of crowdsourcing, leaving everyone that reads his article scratching their heads.
To clear a few things up, remember crowdsourcing is not about melting pot of contributions that robs individuals of accomplishment. It is about tapping into minds that are more creative, smart, diverse and more numerous than you have inside an organization and calling them to contribute for greater innovation and productivity.
Some ways crowdsourcing frees heroic inventors to contribute:
1) If you are stumped on a problem, invite the crowd to solve it. Drawing up the wisdom of many diverse minds for solutions is an example of where crowdsourcing shines. No one is taking away from the glory of the one person that finds the innovative solution. In fact, the solver tends to be more celebrated within a crowdsourcing context than had the solver come from inside a company’s walls.
2) Get the crowd performing small tasks faster than one individual. Take a moment to imagine your full time job being anything you’d come across on Mechanical Turk. Then try and argue that putting those tasks out to the crowd isn’t a genius idea.
3) Don’t guess at demand, quantify consumer desire. An individual comes up with a design on Threadless. The crowd decides which designs they like enough that they should get printed.
Crowdsourcing is a method to drive innovation. What Dan Woods is describing seems more like collectivism or collaboration with equal parts accountability.
Photo by: donayer
The Woods column was very bad. Besides not fully understanding what crowdsourcing is he decides to repeat the mythical trope of the ‘lone inventor’. Many have examined this idea and torn it down (Scott Berkun, for one, has a great take on it). Look at the numerous innovations in the world close enough and soon you see that each one relies on ideas, concepts, and technology previously produced by some other entity (group or firm). All innovation, like scientific discovery, stands on the shoulders of giants. Crowdsourcing is just a different mechanism for conducting what is the inherently social activity of innovation.
[...] 1) illustrates that he does not truly understand crowdsourcing, but sees it as a threat anyway (and he is surely not alone here); and 2) his entire premise (“nothing can substitute for one mind and one voice) is based on [...]