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Hardcover
Publisher: Crown Business
Format: Bargain Price
“The amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing corrects that—but in doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction.”
—From Crowdsourcing
First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, “crowdsourcing” describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise—it’s talented, creative, and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today’s technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It’s a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you’ve got the job.
But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable.
Jeff Howe delves into both the positive and negative consequences of this intriguing phenomenon. Through extensive reporting from the front lines of this revolution, he employs a brilliant array of stories to look at the economic, cultural, business, and political implications of crowdsourcing. How were a bunch of part-time dabblers in finance able to help an investment company consistently beat the market? Why does Procter & Gamble repeatedly call on enthusiastic amateurs to solve scientific and technical challenges? How can companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless employ just a handful of people, yet generate millions of dollars in revenue every year? The answers lie within these pages.
The blueprint for crowdsourcing originated from a handful of computer programmers who showed that a community of like-minded peers could create better products than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Jeff Howe tracks the amazing migration of this new model of production, showing the potential of the Internet to create human networks that can divvy up and make quick work of otherwise overwhelming tasks. One of the most intriguing ideas of Crowdsourcing is that the knowledge to solve intractable problems—a cure for cancer, for instance—may already exist within the warp and weave of this infinite and, as yet, largely untapped resource. But first, Howe proposes, we need to banish preconceived notions of how such problems are solved.
The very concept of crowdsourcing stands at odds with centuries of practice. Yet, for the digital natives soon to enter the workforce, the technologies and principles behind crowdsourcing are perfectly intuitive. This generation collaborates, shares, remixes, and creates with a fluency and ease the rest of us can hardly understand. Crowdsourcing, just now starting to emerge, will in a short time simply be the way things are done.
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| Interesting case studies carry the book |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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"Crowdsourcing" is another of the millions of pop business/technology books out there (a la "The World Is Flat" and "The Long Tail"). The gist of it is that the Internet enables large numbers of people to work together, and that these crowds can collectively outperform experts when organized correctly. Howe insists that crowdsourcing is changing the way stuff happens--how research and development is being conducted at major companies; how photographs and movies are generated, shared, and sold; how (of course!) encyclopedias are being written; how t-shirts are being designed (and so forth). However, he never really strays beyond the knowledge-based, digital side of things to examine the effect of crowdsourcing on physical products or services.
Howe's constant stream of examples and case studies keeps the book from devolving into repetitive drudgery. The concept is easy enough and probably warrants a long feature article in Wired, but not an entire book.
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| Transformational business model, gives great examples |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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The book gives a brief overview of crowdsourcing and then goes into an exhaustive list of different types of crowdsourcing including problem solving, collective filtering, collective content creation, voting, and financing. I really like that it includes so many case studies so that you can see how others have applied crowdsourcing to their businesses. I think it will help you figure out how to apply it to your business. I would whole heartedly recommend this to anyone trying to figure out how to apply crowdsourcing to their business. I think the first company to successfully implement these principles in their niche will dominate the market. Better figure this out now before your competitor does.
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| Great intro to history, strategy, and examples of crowdsourcing |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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This was an enjoyable read- it's an incredibly interesting topic and Jeff Howe does a great job in walking readers through the history, trends, evolution and potential of the crowdsourcing phenomena. Jeff provides a swarm of examples, although several of them are familiar from other books on related topics (would have liked more of the fresh examples). He also does a great job clearly linking this emerging way of interacting to business opportunities through the great examples given. I especially appreciated the specific "rules", frameworks, and recommendations given- if you want to get introduced to and/or find some additional resources and strategies for your crowdsourcing efforts, this is a great one to read.
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| Outstanding topic but a little bit bad written book |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Crowdsourcing is a fascinating topic and the author mentions very good ideas but the book is not so good written. Anyway, if your into collaboration and are eager about crowdsourcing you should read it. This book could have been written in half the pages that the author uses, but has some very good insights, so u should give it a try!
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| Diversity wins |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Crowdsourcing is not about crowds replacing experts (a common, and I would argue misguided claim) but rather an efficient mechanism for identifying them in the first place. What's interesting is that the solutions come from the most unlikely places. Diversity of ideas and approaches always wins, or as Jeff Howe pointed out: "no matter how smart your people are, the smartest ones are always working for another company".
"Crowdsourcing" is a great overview of the successful crowdsourcing examples from recent history: istockphoto, innocentive, current, linux, and a number of others. Jeff Howe offers an insiders look at the mechanics of each community, the incentive systems, and how they came to be. A must read for all entrepreneurs.
Perhaps even more importantly, the author identifies some of the common trends and patterns that all of the successfully executed crowdsourcing projects employed: small problems, community-based interactions, compensation systems, and much more. Thought provoking read. Highly recommended.
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