Crowdsourcing - social outsourcing

2006-06-30T02:31:00.000-07:00

Crowdsourcing
David Rowan

Sometimes a new trend catches on so quickly that, if you sit well back and wear protective goggles, you can just catch its vapour trail as it zips through the culture. That has just happened with a concept known as "crowdsourcing" that you’re about to hear a lot more of. A month ago, nobody had even heard of it. Indeed, on May 18, Google could find only three web pages that mentioned it. Suddenly, though, there are 400,000 "crowdsourcing" references on the net and rising. What on Earth could have popularised a new coinage so quickly?

The answer is another astute article in Wired, the digital-culture magazine that keeps tapping presciently into significant innovations. Last year, this column explored "the long tail", an emerging business concept defined by Wired’s editor, Chris Anderson, as the slowly diminishing trail of demand for niche products, such as obscure DVDs, that, thanks to the net, can now find an audience without any of the traditional marketing costs. A year on, Wired journalist Jeff Howe has identified a new way in which businesses are using the net to connect thousands of strangers in order to make cash. But this time, rather than customers, the strangers are serving as a cheap pool of labour.

Think of it as an extension of outsourcing, whereby a business contracts out certain tasks to save money. Rather than going offshore to find cheap workers, the clued-in digital business is now simply using the vast pool of skills available from the online public. Anyone with a modem and net connection is invited to perform a task or provide a digital product in return for a small fee. Yet because the online crowd is now so huge, businesses are finding what they’re asking for despite the pitiful wages.

Take the business of stock photography. In the old world, if your magazine or corporate brochure needed a few images to perk it up, a conventional picture library would sell you the reproduction rights for perhaps £100 each. Suddenly, that has all changed, thanks to new online libraries such as iStockphoto that have cut the price to as low as 60p. The secret? The 22,000 amateur photographers who between them have uploaded 851,000 royalty-free snaps to the site, all now available for anyone to browse and acquire. The photographers earn a few pennies, the customer gets a bargain. And in the middle, the stock library provides the online exchange that makes it all possible.

Science companies are also looking to the crowd as a source of low-cost labour. InnoCentive is a web-based community where businesses such as Procter & Gamble and Boeing post R&D problems and seek help from the crowd in solving them in exchange for cash. Jill Panetta, InnoCentive’s chief scientific officer, claims that the site has solved at least 30 per cent of the challenges set, many of them worked through by hobbyists rather than professionals. Other online exchanges are even more wide-ranging. Amazon Mechanical Turk, an offshoot of the bookstore, lets anyone post requests for others to perform what it calls "human intelligence tasks", from transcribing podcasts to verifying legal documents. Take the job, and you’ll earn anything from pennies to pounds.

Karl Marx might have had concerns: as competition squeezes wages, it’s hard to see how workers might empower themselves. But that’s capitalism for you. Somewhere along the line, the commune became just another online exchange.

david.rowan@thetimes.co.uk

Book reviews

2005-08-31T02:54:00.000-07:00

Here are the first reviews of the book

“The book addresses the question that all business managers have been struggling with over the past years: how are all these initiatives and projects going to work together. The answer is offered in a simple and practical way. As a reader you truly get the feeling that you can do something with the tips and solutions that are suggested. COP - possibly the missing link to finally get the return on these big bang projects."

Nick Dieltiens - Manager Strategic Projects Group - Toyota Motor Marketing Europe

“We very recently handed over our entire IT processes to a large outsourcer. I wish I would have read Ian’s book before we started as it would have made our life considerably easier.”

Robert F. Walters, former CIO, J. Hancock, USA

"You can actually measure the success of a strategy by looking at what the whole company is focused on (or not). The approach Ian suggests makes this simple concept accessible by involving everyone in the building of a common understanding, with impressive results. The most refreshing business book I’ve read in a long time.”

Jeremy Locke, Marketing Director, Capita, UK

“This book is different - it describes how you can develop a reality check for your strategy, and provides basic but up-to-date insight in the steps a strategy implementation can follow to deliver its promise.”

Flemming Norklit, Managing Director, BSI - Management Systems

“Only by tying working practice (processes) change to IT can organisations get the best out of IT. This book gets your organisation talking a common language and taking a common approach to business improvement. Therefore it will prove to be an invaluable investment."

Hussam Otaibi, VP International Operations, Ventana Research

“I have been involved in many business improvement initiatives over the last 20 years. All of them would have benefited from the principles, methodologies and tools that are so skilfully explained in this book. It provides a comprehensive business management template for dealing with our ever-changing requirements and challenges."

Daniel L. Murphy, Engineering and Production Director, Intrepid Energy North Sea Ltd

Common Approach UnCommon Results

Crowdsourcing - social outsourcing

Crowdsourcing

Book reviews