There is a new book out by Jeff Howe titled: “Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business.” The book takes forward the ideas Jeff presented in an article in 2006 for Wired and that have been used in many books and articles since. A book I recently reviewed by Gary Hamel called Future of Management also used crowdsourcing as a central theme for how companies will compete in the future. This book and the blog are worth a look.
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Thanks for that recommendation (did I miss the blog link above?). It seems like an extension of the ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ book. I’ve seen a few nice crowd-sourced projects, particularly collaborative books on Lulu. One problem with it is that if the effort is shared, then the reward is too, often to the extent where it can be hard to motivate people to participate. I guess it depends on the project, and most companies would like to enlist their customers as collaborators. Amazon does this really well with its reviews database. And people who have had a stake in shaping a product are more likely to become ambassadors for it. The crowdsourcing element is part of the whole customer experience.