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Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business | 
 enlarge | Author: Jeff Howe
Publisher: Crown Business
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $14.45
You Save: $12.50 (46%)
New (39) Used (9) from $13.73
Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 5840
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0307396207
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4058
EAN: 9780307396204
ASIN: 0307396207
Publication Date: August 26, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
 A Survey of Crowdsourcing Activities, Sociological Evaluations, and a Few Prescriptions for Business October 23, 2008
Donald Mitchell (Boston)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
If you have been paying close attention to the subject of crowd sourcing, this book will contain few surprises. But you just might pick up an insight or two that will make the book of much value. That was my experience.
While much of the book covered things I know in more detail than Jeff Howe describes, I began to see connections between how one aspect of crowd sourcing could be combined with other aspects to make more progress more rapidly. I intend to apply those insights into my global project for increasing the rate of global improvements by 20 times.
Ultimately, crowd sourcing's significance is determined in the battle between the tendency of crowds to contain wisdom and the average results of crowds to be lousy. If you use crowd sourcing to get lots of ideas, you also need to rely a lot on crowd sourcing to get rid of the junk.
Although Mr. Howe claims to be taking a journalist's approach to the subject, he comes across as more of an advocate than an observer. In particular, he fails to capture the ways that prolific production of content can overwhelm the accuracy of crowd sourcing votes. Highly ranked contributions often reflect popularity and the crowd's agreement with the conclusions more than the quality of the production. As a result, you can often end up with something that looks like what a lot of undisciplined teenagers would produce.
Yet, even that problem can be solved by adding a layer of expert evaluation to the more popular entries. He mentions that point in passing, but misses its significance.
For a book that aims to describe the fundamentals of how crowd sourcing will be used by business, the conclusion section is pretty limited and abstract. If that's why you want to read the book, borrow the book at the library (or read it standing up at a book store) because you'll finish that section faster than a cup of coffee.
To me, the biggest economic impact will be on problem solving. There's plenty in the book on that point, but Mr. Howe fails to explain why so few companies are using crowds for that purpose.
I conducted a worldwide contest two and a half years ago to gain answers, ran the contest for essentially no money, and was astonished at the quality of the results. But I started with no community, built no community, and don't plan to aim the findings back to establish a new community later. As a result, I seriously question his conclusion that crowd sourcing can only be done by people who get benefits from a community. I would argue, by comparison, that participants need to get some benefits . . . but they don't have to be community-based ones.
I suspect that a better book on this subject would emerge from a crowd sourced methodology rather than relying on typical "professional" journalism methods.
Want some good answers? Ask the world.
Defines the dynamics that will drive the future of commerce October 18, 2008
M. McDonald (Chicago, IL United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 Many hands make light work September 15, 2008
Alexandra Carmichael (San Mateo, CA USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Jeff Howe has done an impressive job of gathering insight into the power of this old adage applied to today's Internet environment. The idea is that by opening up complex problems to the crowd in small chunks, solutions can be found and creative destruction can occur, in diverse industries.
Take the example of iStockphoto, which allowed amateur photographers to undercut professional stock photography companies by opening up the market to anyone with a camera, or Innocentive, where tough research problems are posted and PhD's around the world work on them in their spare time.
Crowdsourcing works, and has blossomed since Howe's original Wired article on the subject. This book has great ideas and case studies that can be applied to give your company, endeavor, or hobby a big leg up. Be the crowdsourcing champion at your organization and buy copies of this book to pass around! Everyone will be happy you did. :)
From Tee Shirts to Research September 9, 2008
Michael S. Paar (Milwaukee, WI USA)
From tee shirts to scientific research, the natives and the immigrants are working as a human network that uses diversity to trump ability. Using Threadless, InnoCentive, iStockphoto, Wikipedia, Longitude, Proctor and Gamble, and Open Source, Jeff Howe describes `crowdsourcing' as the latest way to get it done. A great read! Howe coined the term, and explains the phenom in an easy to read fun positive tough to put down book.
The Answer is Out There September 7, 2008
Michael P. Maslanka (dallas, texas United States)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Apologies to The X Files. This is an interesting, albeit somewhat repititve, look at how the internet + engaged people= a new power source. Lots of insigtful examples: InnoCentive, a company which farms out to its diverse network those issues and problems that large companies, even with their big R and D departments can't solve. Why does it work? Those in the network are often dabblers but they come with no preconceptions and no ingrained group think that often stifles insight. And here is what's really interesting:75% of the time, the answer is already known by the person in the network to whom the problem is matched up with. Communities are forming organically, from the guy who made a movie on his own, put it on the net, and now gives web based training to those who want to do likewise to CincyMoms, part of the local newspaper which pays (not much money) moms in Cincinnati to blog info on the best place to get a pizza or hire a babysitter. Info that matters to their lives. Anyway, good stuff. The answer is out there.
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