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    Unavailable
    Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
    Unavailable
    Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
    Unavailable
    Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
    Audiobook9 hours

    Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

    Written by Jeff Howe

    Narrated by Kirby Heyborne

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "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.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 26, 2008
    ISBN9780739366592
    Unavailable
    Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
    Author

    Jeff Howe

    Jeff Howe is the program coordinator for Media Innovation at Northeastern, and an assistant professor at Northeastern University. A longtime contributing editor at Wired magazine, he coined the term crowdsourcing in a 2006 article for that magazine. In 2008 he published a book with Random House that looked more deeply at the phenomenon of massive online collaboration. Called Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, it has been translated into ten languages. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University during the 2009-2010 academic year, and is currently a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab. He has written for the Washington Post, Newyorker.com, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and many other publications. He currently lives in Cambridge with his wife and two children.

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    Reviews for Crowdsourcing

    3.5/5

    34 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is a fine book if it is your first book on the concept of 'crowdsourcing'. It details a few case studies where crowdsourced companies and projects took the established and strong companies by surprise. I liked the descriptions of the experiments and successful companies such as InnoCentive and iStockPhoto, however the sections about computing, open source, GNU, etc. simply brought me to sleep (GNU and Linux is nothing new and you're probaby from another planet if you haven't heard about GNU/Linux until now, that is an operating system for computers that's been actively developed by the 'crowd' for the last 18 years). But I was very awake when I read about people solving rocket-science problems in the fields in which they did not have a formal education (most of them had PhD.s in other fields, though).Maybe the most valuable part of the book is about failed experiments and also the rules about when crowdsourcing works and when it does not. It is very important to know when and for which scenarios a strategy is useful, otherwise it is easy to mistake crowdsourcing for a hammer and use it to nail down every problem.
    • 3/5
      This book a very good primer to all things "social" online. It helped flesh out some of the history and scope of many of the group efforts out there. But it seemed a tad too long in the depth department. True, the details and longer narratives do add context, proof and support, but a book on this rapidly changing subject really needs to be more focused and intense. At times it felt more like a history book of efforts and systems, than current strategies and "looking forward".I also would have liked more of the "here's is a plan about how you might think about applying these same principals to your business." I know this isn't a "workbook" but those kinds of tidbits would have made it stronger in that a reader could easily start implementing and using the ideas put forward immediately.I realize that I read this book a full year after its publication and much had already changed or been added to the crowdsourced landscape. If ever there were a book that could benefit by a new ebook model or digital errata, this one is it. I have recommended the book twice and if you're in the tech field or wondering how to leverage the crowdsourceing tools out there, you should read this, but if you need anything more hands-on, you might want to surf some blogs.