Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business (Hardcover)

~ Jeff Howe (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An informed and enthusiastic guide to the new collaborative creativity."
—Times (London)

"A welcome and well-written corporate playbook for confusing times."
—BusinessWeek

"An engaging mix of business, sociology, organizational theory, and technology writing and fits the mold of Malcolm Gladwell’s perennial bestseller, The Tipping Point."
—Newsweek

“While small groups have often been the foundation of great performance—think SWAT teams and Skunk Works—Jeff Howe has made the compelling case for the power of far larger communities of interest. He shows in Crowdsourcing—with rich illustrations from Google and InnoCentive to Threadless and Wikipedia—that the right community with the right incentives can often invent, write, and run research and business initiatives more effectively and less expensively than traditional enterprise.”
—Michael Useem, professor of management and director of the Leadership Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of The Go Point: When It’s Time to Decide and The Leadership Moment

“Beyond the wisdom of crowds is the work of crowds, a powerful and transformative source of creativity and an economic engine that defies traditional rules. Jeff Howe’s guide to crowdsourcing—to use his perfect coinage—is insightful, fun, and indispensable to those who want to understand, or participate in, this amazing phenomenon.”
—Steven Levy, author of Hackers and The Perfect Thing

“Jeff Howe has captured a complex and vital change in the business landscape: in the next few years, your customers could become your collaborators, or your competitors. His ability to weave story and strategy together makes Crowdsourcing a readable and indispensable guide to this new world.”
—Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody

Product Description

“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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Crown Business; 1 edition (August 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307396207
• ISBN-13: 978-0307396204
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #38,464 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating topic but disappointing book, December 8, 2008

By	John S. Fry (Eagle, ID USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In his prescient 2006 article in Wired, Jeff Howe coined the term "crowdsourcing" to describe how the Internet has enabled large, distributed teams of amateurs to do work that was previously the domain of isolated experts or corporations. Linux and Wikipedia are only two of hundreds of examples of this phenomenon. Howe's article in Wired focused on two innovative companies who had successfully harnessed the power of crowdsourcing: iStockphoto, a community-driven source for stock photography, and InnoCentive, where corporations offer cash prizes for solving their thorniest research and development problems. Two years later, Howe has expanded his article into a 300-page book.

I'm a fan of Wired, and this is the kind of book I would normally love, but in this case I found myself disappointed. If you've already read Howe's article in Wired, and indeed if you are the kind of person who reads Wired, you won't find much that is new or surprising here. Howe fills up his 300 pages by repeating the same examples over and over. For example, we learn that iStockphoto is so cool that Getty Images finally bought them out. It's a nice story, but Howe can't resist telling it in what seems like every chapter. If you sometimes feel like you're reading the same sentence twice, that's because you are. Here's Howe on page 134 describing "idea jams": "People have pointed out that this is little more than an Internet-enabled suggestion box. Just so. The Internet didn't make crowdsourcing possible--it just made it vastly more effective." A nice observation, but then the identical sentences appear again on page 159. This kind of editorial sloppiness abounds. On page 51, Howe mangles the the recursive acronym of the GNU project. On page 237, he repeats the widely believed but false claim that Xerox PARC invented the computer mouse (it was SRI).

Howe proudly announces that this book itself was "crowdsourced"--he put drafts on his website for the crowd to critique and edit. He probably should have hired a professional editor instead, who would have cut it in half and made it a great book.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Defines the dynamics that will drive the future of commerce, October 17, 2008

By	M. McDonald (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (VINE VOICE)

Every significant trend requires a book that defines its key concepts, pioneers and rational. Crowdsourcing is that book for the application of social and community capability to business and society. Jeff Howe has created a readable chronicle of the early adopters who use crowds to replace experts. Coupled with James Surowieck's "Wisdom of Crowds" the two books will be used in corporate offices and marketing teams to look at how to engage crowds in the future.

Executives, marketing professionals, and product managers should read both books to better understand how to tap into this resource. However, do not expect a recipe book, specific solutions, or a road map to crowdsourcing.

Readers will find the book very descriptive and illustrative, which is strength, but its analysis and recommendations are a weakness and hence the reason for a four star review. I still highly recommend this book, but recognize that it comes from a journalistic tradition, rather than a hard core business book. Given the subject matter, I believe that the journalistic approach is more fitting to the subject.

This book is recommended to gain an understanding of this phenomenon, pick up examples and stories, and gain a new vocabulary. Strategists, executives, and marketing types will find examples that they will need to think about in order to gain the answers they are looking for and need.

DETAILED REVIEW

The book focuses on describing how to crowds are creating new sources of value than the specific ways to tap into that value. Chapters 1 through 5, the first half of the book, concentrates on providing examples of the crowd sourcing phenomenon. The second half focuses down on the impact of crowds to economic and business organization.

Chapter 1: The Rise of the Amateur - discusses the shifting balance between individuals with deep expertise and communities of interest. These differences and the increasing amateur access to information and collaboration are changing the playing field in multiple disciplines for the better.

Chapter 2: From So Simple a Beginning - traces the rise of crowd sourcing back to the open source software movement. Howe details the early history of open source software, an interesting tale, as well as its basic principles of self responsibility, community contribution, and breaking large problems into small units. Howe describes the start of Wikipedia, SETI and the USPTO's use of open software approaches in the chapter.

Chapter 3: Faster, Cheaper, Smarter, Easier - looks at the results that come from employing diversity and crowds to solve complex problems. Examples here range from desktop publishing, viral video, and music. In each case, the shift from centralized to distributed production results in the transformation of markets and the creation of new opportunities.

Chapter 4: The Rise and Fall of the Firm - puts together the principles of the first three chapters and describes their collective impact on modern business and market structures. Howe uses readily accessible examples, like CincyMoms, to illustrate how open access; amateur interest and aggregating intelligence upset traditional markets and organizations. This chapter is well researched and may be the best of the book as it bridges between academic studies (Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks') with real life examples.

Chapter 5: The Most Universal Quality - discusses the role of diversity and the power of crowds to aggregate diversity to match or out perform experts in many different situations. This chapter is the most like the Wisdom of Crowds as Howe explains both socially and mathematically how a crowd of amateurs can be more accurate than an individual expert.

Chapter 6: What the Crowd Knows is an extension of Chapter 5 and concentrates on the channeling of crowd wisdom into collective wisdom through prediction markets and other types of solutions. The chapter also introduces the idea of Marketocracy as a means to find talent in a crowd based on their results rather than their resumes.

Chapter 7: What the Crowd Creates focuses on the creative aspects of communities that require a different set of solutions to the aggregation of collective intelligence. These chapter discuses the notion of user-generated content and its dynamics based on tools, incentives, rewards, and ownership. It dives deep into the operation of iStock as an example of a company that harnesses the creations of a community.

Chapter 8: What the Crowd Thinks recognized the power of personal expression in terms of participatory decision making, reviews and visibility. Howe points out that about 10% of a community provides their opinions and views, setting the tone for the overall community. However those opinions operate as a significant filter for the community. BTW, Howe points out that Amazon reviews are an example of this - so welcome to the crowd. This chapter focuses on phenomenon such as American Idol and Digg as illustrations of crowd opinions.

Chapter 9: What the Crowd Funds is a short chapter that discusses the application of crowd sourcing principles to finance with applications such as peer-to-peer lending, micro-lending and Barak Obama's appeal to large numbers of small individual donors.

Chapter 10: Tomorrow's Crowd highlights the rise of the digital native and the fact that people growing up today expect to work more collaboratively than their parents. This chapter explores how this next generation works, multitasks and collaborates. These traits are largely explained through changes in the media industry, which makes sense since digital natives are currently the target audience in that market. It's just a matter of time before they are the target audience in every market.

Chapter 11: Conclusion - the rules of Crowdsourcing summarizes the book, wrapping its ideas into a few simple and powerful rules:

1. Pick the right model from among collective intelligence, creation, voting, or funding.
2. Pick the right crowd from the participants to the people who will influence and usher the crowd.
3. Offer the right incentives to the crowd that are often expressed in recognition rather just money.
4. Keep the pink slips in the drawer - crowdsourcing is not outsourcing
5. The dumbness of crowds, or the benevolent dictator principle - crowds need leaders who influence
6. Keep it simple, break it down - give the crowd something each individual can work on, yet can aggregate into something great.
7. Remember Sturgeon's Law - 90% of what is created is crap so you will need to allow the crowd to separate the cream from the crap
8. Remember the 10 percent, the antidote to Sturgeon's law - related to #7 that the crow can do the sorting in a democratic and open forum better than the experts.
9. The community is always right
10. Ask not what the crowd can do for you, but what you can do for the crowd - a crowd forms and is most effective when it sis working on something it wants.

Crowdsourcing is among the foundational books for the next generation of commerce, whether you call it Web 2.0, Social Production, or Crowdsourcing, - this book describes the core principles and examples of the way we will work in the future.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Look at Collective Intelligence, March 8, 2009

By	Gregg Eldred (Avon Lake, OH USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    (VINE VOICE)

Personally, I find the whole "Wisdom of the Crowd" theme fascinating. One of the major outcomes of the internet is that it has allowed more participation by the average person which can be tapped by solutions and companies that recognize that there are people willing to contribute (often times for free). This isn't new, it's just that the internet breaks down barriers to entry. While I read, and enjoyed, The Wisdom of Crowds, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, by Jeff Howe, provides more detail and also shows both sides of the "crowd mentality."

Contents: Introduction; The Rise of the Amateur; From So Simple a Beginning; Faster, Cheaper, Smarter, Easier; The Rise and Fall of the Firm; The Most Universal Quality; What the Crowd Knows; What the Crowd Creates; What the Crowd Thinks; What the Crowd Funds; Tomorrow's Crowd; Conclusion; Notes; Acknowledgements; Index

Jeff Howe, a contributing editor for Wired magazine, first discussed the phenomena of "crowdsourcing" in a June 2006 article for the magazine. Taking that subject and expounding upon it, he has created a very engaging book. His premise, that people don't want to consume passively, is shown in many anecdotes throughout the book. Where companies, and people, recognize that others would like to comment on, enhance, and contribute to, a particular product or service, those items gain more market share and better relationships with their customers. Instead of the internet isolating people, it has, in the hands of the right people, created unprecedented levels of collaboration. It also has, with services such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and others, allowed for meaningful relationships that otherwise could not have occurred. However, Howe researched this book for two years, and provides the other side of crowdsourcing; failures, lack of participation; and the effect that Google has had on it. Throughout the book, you realize that there is a fundamental shift in the way that business is being conducted. Where once business operated within a silo, many are now opening themselves to the billions of people with internet access and the using their wisdom for products, testing, and as employees.

Comparisons of this book to James Surowieck's, The Wisdom of Crowds, are natural. While Surowieck's book is an excellent look at the crowd, Howe's book goes further. Both are great looks at the use of crowds to spark innovation, but Howe provides more information about tapping the right community, how companies have leveraged the crowd, and what a possible future will look like. In addition, he provides the reader with some rules for crowdsourcing, which help to solidify the contents of the book. Howe has created an extremely readable view of this phenomena. He provides insightful comments from the gaming community, where the companies really care about what they have created. So much so, that they tap their communities not only for traditional feedback, but also for employees and ideas. While this seems to be a natural extension of their games, there are lessons to be learned by them for "traditional" organizations. Thoughtfully researched, Howe has written a fascinating look at one of the most interesting aspects of the internet.