Finding the Right Research
Crowdsourcing may be trendy and Open Innovation the latest business buzz but companies still waiting to see whether these business practices are sustainable, might be interested in looking beyond the headlines and at some of the academic research indicating legitimacy.
IdeaConnection posted a thought provoking article on this subject last fall, quoting a report called“Web-Based Creativity: Can Working in Virtual Communities Be More Effective Than Face-to-Face Cooperation?” in which Science Daily reports on the work of Piet Kommers of the University of Twente in The Netherlands. The article reports “growing evidence that working in virtual communities and using online tools together can be even more effective in some areas than face-to-face cooperation.”
Recently, researchers at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University have added support to this study, finding that the quality of crowdsourced articles compared favorably with articles written by a single author and with Simple English Wikipedia entries. The work was partly supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.
“This is exciting because collaborative crowdsourcing could change the future of work,” said CMU research team leader Aniket Kittur. “We foresee a day when it will be possible to tap into hundreds of thousands or millions of workers around the globe to accomplish creative work on an unprecedented scale.” To divide and assign the various tasks involved in writing the articles, researchers used a framework they developed called CrowdForge.
Joel West, on Open Innovation Blog takes the premise that “crowdsourcing is not a theory but an umbrella term that subsumes a range of phenomena, which can be studied using multiple theoretical perspectives. This increased conceptual clarity shows that academic research on crowdsourcing is maturing much faster than I’d realized.”
For further reading, also check out the work of professor and consultant Daren C. Brabham, Ph.D., who has spent nearly five years focusing his research on crowdsourcing and has a book on the subject coming out this year.
Reader Comments
This sounds very similar to the way open source projects are run; for example, linux operating systems, and software like wordpress. Also, there is a growth in using real-time screen-sharing tools, which allow virtual teams made up of people around the globe. Seems totally proven as an effective model to me.
Posted by Rachel on October 25, 2011
A business associate mentioned 'crowdsourcing' the other day so i googled it. Your blog came up so i am trying to understand this concept more fully. I agree with Amy that there is certainly potential there.
Posted by david miller on October 24, 2011
Crowdsourcing is a relatively newer concept but has a lot of potential. I think we should have more of such resources where work can be collaborated like this.
Amy
Posted by Amy on August 15, 2011
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