Linux enthusiasts are given to repeating Eric Raymond’s dictum that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. But the power of large numbers of people is not limited to finding errors. As Steve Lohr says in this article, collective intelligence or the wisdom of crowds is being applied especially to improve innovation efforts. IBM has used “Jams” 13 times over the last 7 years to generate ideas from among its people, and the Netflix Prize has successfully used crowdsourcing to significantly improve its movie recommendation algorithms. However, as Lohr emphasizes, these open-innovation efforts work only because some element of centralized selection is used to reap the benefits of decentralized thinking.
Large numbers of people contributing to open innovation is not sufficient for it to be productive. These models work “only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators” Lohr might have added to this observation had he cited James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, who stressed that for the crowd to be wise, it must be characterized by diversity of opinion, independence of members from one another, and a specific kind of decentralization, and there needs to be a good method for aggregating opinions.
Although this article is not particularly detailed, it does point to some interesting recent work by Thomas W. Malone. Malone and his colleagues, in a recent paper, “Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence”, set out to understand and clarify the design patterns of collective intelligence systems. They looked at the gene-like building blocks in more than 250 examples of collective intelligence enabled by the Web. Their goal is to create a systematic framework for thinking about collective intelligence, enabling managers to “do more than just look at examples and hope for inspiration”. By doing so, they also aim to correct the “misconception that you can sprinkle crowd wisdom on something and things will turn out for the best.”