The three articles we have to read for this week are: ‘The Collective Intelligence Genome’ by Thomas W. Malone, Robert Laubacher and Chrysanthos Dellarocas (2010), ‘Which Kind of Collaboration Is Right for You?’ by Gary P. Pisano and Roberto Verganti (2008) and ‘Prediction Markets: A New Tool for Strategic Decision Making’ by Adam Borison and Gregory Hamm (2010).
The first article offers a new framework for understanding Collective Intelligence systems and for understanding how to build them. Collective Intelligence genomes consist of building blocks that are called ‘genes’. These genes are classified by four main questions:
-What is being done?
-Who is doing it?
-Why are they doing it?
-How is it being done?
The second article is about the different modes of collaboration. It emphasizes how important it is for companies to choose the right mode of collaboration. Choosing the wrong mode could lead to a failure in developing new technologies, designs and end-products. Four different modes are mentioned in the article: Open Flat, Open Hierarchical, Closed Flat and Closed Hierarchical. The main point of the article is that companies have to keep in mind that a solid understanding of the strategy of their company is the basis due to develop an effective approach.
The third article explains how prediction markets work and why they are better then approaches that people used in the past. Although people keep developing new tools for decision making to minimize the uncertainty, we have to keep in mind that we will never be able to completely avoid uncertainty.
The related article of choice is about the impact of social media on crowdsourcing. Individuals became an essential component to crowdsourcing as it allow you to easily reach a wide bunch of people. Two real life examples that illustrates the influence of social media on crowdsourcing are Threadless and Doritos.
In order to spread word about their design, designers use social media to get people voting on them. Last year Threadless had 1.3 million visits (per month) from audience through Facebook and StumbleUpon. The crowdsourcing campaign of Doritos is called Viralocity and completely relies on social media. Individuals are asked to think about names for their newest flavors, and make a video about it and share it on social media. The video with the highest rates (every like, retweet, share, unique page view etc. counts for one point) wins.
