Google. Wikipedia. Threadless. All are exemplars of collective intelligence in action. Two of them are famous. The third is getting there.
Each of the three helps demonstrate how large, loosely organized groups of people can work together electronically in surprisingly effective ways — sometimes even without knowing that they are working together, as in the case of Google. Google takes the judgments made by millions of people as they create links to web pages and harnesses that collective knowledge of the entire web to produce amazingly intelligent answers to the questions we type into the Google search bar.
In Wikipedia, thousands of contributors from across the world have collectively created the world’s largest encyclopedia, with articles of remarkably high quality. Wikipedia has been developed with almost no centralized control. Anyone who wants to can change almost anything, and decisions about what changes to keep are made by a loose consensus of those who care. What’s more, the people who do all this work don’t even get paid; they’re volunteers.
The Leading Question
How can you get crowds to do what your business needs done?
Findings
- Collective intelligence has already been proven to work, and CI systems can be designed and managed to fit specific needs.
- CI building blocks, or “genes,” can be recombined to create the right kind of system.
- Four main questions drive CI “genome” design: What is being done? Who is doing it? Why? How?
In Threadless, anyone who wants to can design a T-shirt, submit that design to a weekly contest and then rate their favorite designs. From the entries receiving the highest ratings, the company selects winning designs, puts them into production and gives prizes and royalties to the winning designers. In this way, the company harnesses the collective intelligence of a community of over 500,000 people to design and select T-shirts.
These examples of web-enabled collective intelligence are inspiring to read about.1 More than inspiring, even; they’ve come to look like management wish fulfillment — evidence that a committed embrace of collective intelligence is all it takes for a company to magically divine market desires, create exactly what’s needed to satisfy them and do it all at little or no cost. Come let the crowd get your work done for you — cheap, perfect and now.
In fact, it’s
Get Premium Already a Premium Subscriber? Sign In
Purchase
Buy this article
Purchase one or more copies as a PDF
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1977-2011. All rights reserved.
Brilliant and insightful. No more needs to be said!!
The first half of the article is great. Will the second half of the article be made available to the open-sourced, public Collective Intelligence Genome anytime soon?
Fascinating article, but I have a paperless office and was frustrated by my inability to use Acrobat to highlight and add notes to my pdf copy of the story. It seems to me that the story could be “secure” (that is, nobody can alter the text) yet still allow highlight function and post notes.