Cambrian House

The company that crowdsources everything

John W. Hicks interviews Michael Sikorsky, founder of Cambrian House via telephone, May 16, 2007

Michael Sikorsky is CEO, Cambrian House. This is the "home of crowdsourcing,” a community-owned incubator of sorts. It calls itself "a diverse collective of creative, tech-savvy and entrepreneurial minds." Under his leadership, Cambrian House has become a frontrunner in crowdsourcing, attracting the attention of the Harvard Business School, Business Week, Financial Times and CNET, among others. Sikorsky has spoken at events like Community 2.0 Conference, MESH and the Red Herring Top 100. Cambrian House is his fifth start-up, the last being Servidium, acquired near the top of the dotcom bubble. In early 2007, he was named winner of the Great Canadian Pitch Off for the best elevator pitch at the Canadian Venture Forum. Sikorsky is also active in the business community as a guest lecturer on entrepreneurship and as an angel investor. He holds a Computer Engineer degree from the University of Alberta and a software patent related to polymorphic rendering techniques.

John W. Hicks: What is your personal definition of crowdsourcing? What makes crowdsourcing innovative and distinguishes it from now conventional ways of assembling talent, ideas and energy on the Web to develop projects like Linux, Apache or Wikipedia?

Michael Sikorsky: There are a couple of things. Declining cost of communication combined with the investment in high speed Internet has enabled people to be connected across the globe and mass collaboration is starting to happen. Take Linux or Apache or the Wikipedia, for example. By my personal definition, crowdsourcing means mass collaboration occurring with meaning or commercial reason. It is not something new, it is not like it is something that is not already happening on the Web but it is when that the community not only develops but manages the process as well.

The last thing that I think about when I think of crowdsourcing is the distinction between the wisdom of crowds and the participation of crowds. Not a lot of people separate these two but I try to separate them a lot. Sometimes you do not want both.

A perfect example is American Idol. It is the wisdom of crowds. Right? Sony/BMG loves knowing how many people text message votes for a contestant because it tells them how to spend money on developing those artists since it shows them how deep the demand is. However, when you think of the participation of crowds, Sony or BMG do not want you remixing a Kelly Clarkson CD and reselling it. So, some people and companies are really, really in love with the wisdom of crowds but not really in love with participation as it can complicate a process.

If you look at participation of crowds, the question is how many are participating in the development of a software project. When and how you leverage participation of crowds depends upon what you are working on. After all, not too many people are actually participating in the building process. If you look at Linux and the Linux kernel, it took years before Linus Torvalds let anyone else contribute code to the kernel so the real creation of Linux was created by one guy and then opened up for effective participation of the crowd.

To take another example, a book has to be created by one person if it is like a novel. However, imagine using the wisdom of crowds to edit the same book: deciding chapter titles, coming up with better sentences and such stuff that would be unbelievable. Again, if you had a thousand people trying to write a book all at the same time, you would get the world's worst book. If you think through the process of crowdsourcing, you think about wisdom versus participation and you can start designing how you could ask the crowd questions in far more clever ways so as not to elicit the dumbness of crowds.

The "Expertise of the Periphery," a Harvard Business professor weighs in on the crowd

J Jack Unrau interviews Karim Lakhani via telephone on May 14th, 2007

Karim Lakhani is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School's Technology and Operations Management Unit. He is a serious scholar of crowdsourcing, trying to build theories of if, how and why it works. In the past he's also written on open source theory and innovation, including articles about Wikipedia and open source science.

J Jack Unrau: The first thing I wanted to ask you was, what got you into the whole idea of studying crowdsourcing?

Karim Lakhani: I've been studying open source communities since '98 and open source is sort of a precursor to the crowdsourcing meme. That interest actually came out of my...both academic interest but also professional experience when I worked at General Electric in medical systems and I discovered that a lot of the innovations that GE was going to "bring to life" - you know the tagline "bringing things to life" - were already done by users. In a new product development/marketing role that I had at GE I just couldn't understand this at all. I guess with all the sort of the wisdom and training I got at both GE and also in undergrad in Engineering and business that seemed kind of counter-intuitive.

When I ended up at MIT to do my Master's degree in Technology and Policy I noticed the same thing where users were developing all the software I was using in my research - you know Linux and Apache and so forth - and it remained a puzzle as to why this would be happening. So I took a course on innovation and management at the Sloan school where Eric Von Hippel sort of talked about user driven innovation. He had shown that in many products that users were the first people to innovate and now what it looked like was not just that users were innovating but they were creating whole new systems and sort of replacing the traditional role of manufacturers in terms of design, build, support and so forth.

So that got me interested in open source communities and I switched my research topics from biomedical into actually open source and distributed innovation kind of work. Specifically in terms of ... one of the things I was doing in my dissertation explicitly was to investigate extensions of the open source model to other settings and I came across InnoCentive. They were taking one core practice of broadcasting your problems to anyone else in the world and getting help from anybody else in the world and I said "Wow! This is exactly like this one narrow practice of open source."