Crowdsourcing and Innovation

A combination of "crowd" and "outsourcing," the term "crowdsourcing" was coined by Jeff Howe who wrote an overview about it for Wired magazine in 2006. Here's how he described the concept: "Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd….It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing."

We're in a new age of connectivity with the Internet. Despite all the distractions, the Internet era is helping us get back to our roots: forming communities of interest, sharing and improving upon ideas, and ultimately innovating in a collective manner—in real time. And modern crowdsourcing is gaining traction. It involves identifying a problem and putting out an open call to a group of people to solicit ideas, solutions, and innovations. The belief is that by combining expertise and creative thinking, the best solutions will ultimately emerge from collaborative effort.

People rarely come up with amazing ideas in an instant or by themselves. Innovative ideas usually take a lot of time to percolate. History is full of half ideas that only became powerful innovations after combining forces with other ideas. Stephen Johnson explores this concept in his insightful video on collective innovation.

Although crowdsourcing is a relatively new buzzword, the concept is hardly new. In fact, we can partially blame the industrial era for interrupting our natural tendency to collectively create. In his book Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe goes on to explain that prior to the industrial age and the rise of mass production, the line between audience and creator was not as rigid. People met in parlor rooms and coffee houses to exchange and evolve innovative ideas. The decentralized Internet is helping us dismantle the boundaries we've been used to for multiple generations, bringing us back to an ancient tradition of shared storytelling.

At ILG, we're most interested in what crowdsourcing has in store for the learning/training field. Crowdsourcing encourages sharing ideas in order to mine the most innovative solutions to learning challenges. It's improving our ability to collaborate, making learning easier and more innovative than ever. We're all pretty familiar with certain crowdsourced resources: wikipedia.com, stock photography sites like istockphoto.com, product and service review sites like Yelp.com and TripAdvisor.com all come to mind. Companies are developing new crowdsourcing tools that give users access to essential information when they need it.

Crowdsourcing is also gaining popularity with online training. Basic topics are established and then content is solicited from either a defined group or an open audience. The result is often an interactive learning experience based on the collection of content. The Faculty Project is one example, where professors from all over the world join together to create free online courses on a wide variety of topics using PowerPoint files, PDF documents, videos, and other supporting materials.

In his article for TrainingZone, Matt Pierce discusses the role of crowdsourcing in the flipped training content model, which gives learners access to training materials prior to the training session. He suggests crowdsourcing as a way to survey an organization's workforce to find people with expertise in certain areas who can share their knowledge. Incentives and prizes for the most valuable contributions are built in.

How have you used crowdsourcing in your organization to build and share common knowledge?