Innovation as Collaborative Activity

Mass creativity when the crowd sources itself

Lilly Evans interviews Charles Leadbeater.

Charles Leadbeater is a globe-trotting consultant, futurologist, journalist, and author. His latest work, We-think, examines the phenomenon of mass creativity and is hosted in draft form on Wikia. Leadbeater co-authored "The Pro-Am Revolution" in 2004 and has reported on the expansion of open technology and its impact on society since the 1980s. Leadbeater participated in this interview via email from Portland, Oregon.

Lilly Evans: Why did you get interested and involved in crowdsourcing?

Charles Leadbeater: I’ve been interested in innovation for a long time. In the past four or five years I’ve got increasingly interested in innovation as a collaborative, social, and potentially mass activity, getting away from seeing it as something only done by special people in special places.

Q: What has been problematic about crowdsourcing?

A: There are lots of issues about it: when it works and when not. Collective intelligence is not always possible or better. Crowds can be wise or angry mobs and much in between.

The particular issue with crowdsourcing I think is the “sourcing” idea. It draws from outsourcing, which implies the crowd is being sourced by an organization for a better solution. That presents it as an organizational or process innovation which overlaps with Henry Chesbrough’s work on open innovation: widening the funnel drawing ideas into a company. But as well as open innovation into a company there is open innovation out, where a group of people create a core together upon which a larger collective builds. I think this is less amenable to the crowdsourcing metaphor because there may well be no formal organization doing the sourcing, the crowd is sourcing itself.

Q: Does crowdsourcing involve more support and management than a traditional environment would? Or less?

A: It rarely works as a free-for-all. It requires some core norms and rules of behavior, but not many. It does require leadership but of a particular, open, conversational kind. It thrives on decentralized cooperation and people taking responsibility for working together. So it needs a leadership that makes the conditions for that possible.

Q: What characteristics of a crowdsourced endeavor make it more or less likely to succeed?

A: Crowds might combine more diverse points of view, tools, knowledge, making innovation and problem solving more likely. Crowds sometimes find it difficult to agree on fundamental goals so cannot collaborate or just as bad they become mobs with no room for critical thought and dissent.

Q: Do you see any crowdsourcing "low-hanging fruit" that has not yet been exploited, and if so, what?

A: There is a huge growth in what might call Pop Idol models: companies trying to draw on a wider talent base but to feed an essential unchanged corporate process. There is much potential for collective intelligence in education, health, politics, news and media, cultural production. We’ve only just begun.

Q: You have run crowdsourcing project with We-think. What did you do that worked well?

A: It is still in process so its early to say but:

-- I got a lot of encouragement from a lot of people
-- I got some great ideas and links to people doing related work
-- it got the idea to a wider audience/conversation globally much faster
-- I got some specific criticisms/questions/comments that were very helpful.

Q: What did you do that didn't work so well?

A: But on the flip side:

-- people do not necessarily want to help me write a book, they want to contribute to something that matters for them, motivation is critical
-- professional editors still matter a lot, they have provided the most searching criticisms
-- it takes a lot of time to respond to the multiple interactions/questions.

Edited by Andy Sternberg.