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Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business | 
 enlarge | Author: Jeff Howe
Publisher: Crown Business
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $13.25
You Save: $13.70 (51%)
New (36) Used (6) from $13.25
Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 6501
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0307396207
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4058
EAN: 9780307396204
ASIN: 0307396207
Publication Date: August 26, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New Hardcover -- Last copy in stock!
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Product Description
“The amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it. Crowdsourcing corrects that—but in doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction.”
—From Crowdsourcing
First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, “crowdsourcing” describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise—it’s talented, creative, and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today’s technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It’s a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open to people of every imaginable background. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you’ve got the job.
But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable.
Jeff Howe delves into both the positive and negative consequences of this intriguing phenomenon. Through extensive reporting from the front lines of this revolution, he employs a brilliant array of stories to look at the economic, cultural, business, and political implications of crowdsourcing. How were a bunch of part-time dabblers in finance able to help an investment company consistently beat the market? Why does Procter & Gamble repeatedly call on enthusiastic amateurs to solve scientific and technical challenges? How can companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless employ just a handful of people, yet generate millions of dollars in revenue every year? The answers lie within these pages.
The blueprint for crowdsourcing originated from a handful of computer programmers who showed that a community of like-minded peers could create better products than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft. Jeff Howe tracks the amazing migration of this new model of production, showing the potential of the Internet to create human networks that can divvy up and make quick work of otherwise overwhelming tasks. One of the most intriguing ideas of Crowdsourcing is that the knowledge to solve intractable problems—a cure for cancer, for instance—may already exist within the warp and weave of this infinite and, as yet, largely untapped resource. But first, Howe proposes, we need to banish preconceived notions of how such problems are solved.
The very concept of crowdsourcing stands at odds with centuries of practice. Yet, for the digital natives soon to enter the workforce, the technologies and principles behind crowdsourcing are perfectly intuitive. This generation collaborates, shares, remixes, and creates with a fluency and ease the rest of us can hardly understand. Crowdsourcing, just now starting to emerge, will in a short time simply be the way things are done.
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| Customer Reviews:
Many hands make light work September 15, 2008
Alexandra Carmichael (San Mateo, CA USA)
Jeff Howe has done an impressive job of gathering insight into the power of this old adage applied to today's Internet environment. The idea is that by opening up complex problems to the crowd in small chunks, solutions can be found and creative destruction can occur, in diverse industries.
Take the example of iStockphoto, which allowed amateur photographers to undercut professional stock photography companies by opening up the market to anyone with a camera, or Innocentive, where tough research problems are posted and PhD's around the world work on them in their spare time.
Crowdsourcing works, and has blossomed since Howe's original Wired article on the subject. This book has great ideas and case studies that can be applied to give your company, endeavor, or hobby a big leg up. Be the crowdsourcing champion at your organization and buy copies of this book to pass around! Everyone will be happy you did. :)
From Tee Shirts to Research September 9, 2008
Michael S. Paar (Milwaukee, WI USA)
From tee shirts to scientific research, the natives and the immigrants are working as a human network that uses diversity to trump ability. Using Threadless, InnoCentive, iStockphoto, Wikipedia, Longitude, Proctor and Gamble, and Open Source, Jeff Howe describes `crowdsourcing' as the latest way to get it done. A great read! Howe coined the term, and explains the phenom in an easy to read fun positive tough to put down book.
 The Answer is Out There September 7, 2008
Michael P. Maslanka (dallas, texas United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Apologies to The X Files. This is an interesting, albeit somewhat repititve, look at how the internet + engaged people= a new power source. Lots of insigtful examples: InnoCentive, a company which farms out to its diverse network those issues and problems that large companies, even with their big R and D departments can't solve. Why does it work? Those in the network are often dabblers but they come with no preconceptions and no ingrained group think that often stifles insight. And here is what's really interesting:75% of the time, the answer is already known by the person in the network to whom the problem is matched up with. Communities are forming organically, from the guy who made a movie on his own, put it on the net, and now gives web based training to those who want to do likewise to CincyMoms, part of the local newspaper which pays (not much money) moms in Cincinnati to blog info on the best place to get a pizza or hire a babysitter. Info that matters to their lives. Anyway, good stuff. The answer is out there.
A must read for new media knowledge August 29, 2008
J. Hopkinson (NYC)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Like Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson before him with The Long Tail, Crowdsourcing began with a compelling Wired Magazine article, expanded with a blog, and was a deep enough and important enough topic in the new media age that it needed a book to be fully covered. Howe does a great job of mixing in definitions with several case studies to give the reader a fuller understanding of this phenomenon. A good read.
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