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