The theme of this week is “Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding and Prediction Market”. As internet becomes more accessible, the use of crowd, which means finding skillful people from outside becomes more popular. As a result, how corporations decide to do so and in what way they can attract people as well as manage them well remains an important topic.
The first article, “The Collective Intelligence Genome” introduces a framework by asking for questions: What, Who, Why and How. Collective intelligence takes advantage of the ideas of not only employees or consultants but many people. Once companies decide to do so, problems like how to appeal enough attenders, especially those qualified to get involved in and make sure that the ideal outcomes occurs.
The second article, “Which Kind of Collaboration is Right for you” divides the ways to collaborate on a project into four dimensions: Innovation Mall (most related to the term crowdsourcing), Innovation Community, Elite Circle, and Consortium. This is based on the extent of participation (closed or open) and governance (hierarchical or flat).
The last article narrows down to the topic “Prediction Market”. Compare to the traditional ways on strategic decision making by limited experts, it is a market which individuals bet on specific outcome in order to win rewards depending on the contract. To me, it is an effective tool for predicting social issues. But when it comes to business, it seems that it is not mature enough yet, so more other data or advice from experts should still be taken into consideration.
The related article I found is “Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation”, by social architect Braden Kelly. It talks about how a company uses the outer talent pool to create more value. Innovation is an important part for a firm’s value chain nowadays. Before doing so, managers have to think carefully of the characteristic of his or her organization, that is, clarify the goal and why it should seek for the crowd as a resource.
And I compared two different operating system: IOS (Apple) and Android (Google Play). While Android uses open resource, IOS has a more closed network with open source components. In addition, Android has a Linux-based platform while IOS makes OSX, an UNIX based operating system used by more private networks like universities and enterprises.
Apple turns to a more closed network because creating consensus products is part of their business strategy. The good thing is that it is able to control and maintain integrity throughout its system, but the applications would be limited since it is impossible for an elite group to create so many. That’s why for developing Apps, Apple moves closer to open network later on; as for Android, it is known as an open-source software. The use of collective intelligence has always played an important role for its development. However, since it is so opened, the security problem has to be taken into serious consideration so that the system won’t be damaged intentionally.
