Its amazing, when I think about it. Tomi and I wrote CDB the winter of 2004 and published in 2005.
Of course we were mad raving loonies, whoever thought that such breakthrough case hstories such as OhmyNews, perhaps the first in citizen journalism and the first in realising the potential of collective intelligence would be so mainstream today. So its always pleasing to see an article like this one. Leaps of the human imagination?
For a couple of days this month, executives from American Express, General Electric Money, Mars, and Whirlpool will chuck their high-priced consultants and brainiac research and development teams and turn to 3,000 MBA students to solve their strategic dilemmas.The students are competing to come up with products and services by tackling the companies' real-world problems. Megacorporations are embracing such contests - the buzzword is "crowdcasting" - to keep their competitive edge by mind-melding with the next generation of business leaders.
The payoff from crowdcasting is the chance to break open a closed-circuit corporate culture and profit from the fresh insights of a large group of well-educated outsiders.
Unlike crowdsourcing, the meme of the moment that refers to tapping consumers for ideas, crowdcasting broadcasts a company's problem to a specific - and carefully chosen - group. Think of crowdsourcing as a giant creative rave, and crowdcasting as a private backstage party you can't get into if you're not on the list. In Idea Crossing's Innovation Challenge, contestants sign confidentiality agreements, and their strategic solutions become the property of the corporate sponsors.
So remember, when you go to work don't forget your fishing rod!
Hi Alan - Great post, and interesting distinctions between the different types of crowd utilisation approaches. Another example of crowdcasting is the Netflix prize (http://www.netflixprize.com/index), where the company is aiming to harness the brainpower of analysts around the world to improve the accuracy of their predictive models. The grand prize is US$1M if an improvement of 10% is achieved using the provided data set. The current leaderboard shows a 6.75% improvement, so no grand prize yet...
Posted by: Michael | February 20, 2007 at 12:11 PM
And I think that harnessing collective intelligence can be deployed in so many ways.
I was having lunch with someone yesterday, where we were discussing collective intelligence within the medical world. Fascinating.
Thanks for posting.
And we need to catch up
Alan
Posted by: Alan moore | February 20, 2007 at 01:57 PM
It is interesting to note the differentiation you make between crowdsourcing and crowdcasting - and it seems logical. I have been studying about open source models in analytics and put some of the ideas in our blog. I also refer to the Netflix challenge.
http://diamondinfoanalytics.com/blog1/2007/02/23/crowdsourcing-analytics/
It seems that crowdcasting might be an interesting application area for us.
Posted by: Amaresh Tripathy | February 23, 2007 at 11:58 PM
The new brand of clothes are nothing like the old one. Right now, almost everything is done in different countries and then imported to the United States to be sold to consumers.
Posted by: karemillen | March 20, 2011 at 01:22 PM