Internal crowdsourcing, which seeks to channel the ideas and expertise of the company’s own employees, allows employees to interact dynamically with coworkers in other locations, propose new ideas, and suggest new directions to management. Because many large companies have pockets of expertise and knowledge scattered across different locations, harnessing the cognitive diversity within organizations can open up rich new sources of innovation.

Analytics capabilities can greatly expand a company’s ability to innovate — but what do you do when the talent you need just isn’t available? Agribusiness giant Syngenta, faced with an insurmountable analytics talent bottleneck, turned to crowdsourcing. Using a series of contests, it outsourced the development of a set of award-winning analytics tools to improve its decision making — and learned, in the process, some key factors supporting successful crowdsourcing.

Crowdfunding is changing how entrepreneurs bring new products to market. It has allowed thousands of innovating entrepreneurs to raise money, build brand awareness, and join a broader conversation with large numbers of potential backers — all while still in the product development process. But crowdfunding’s potential goes beyond financing and marketing. The people who back projects can also be important sources for product feedback and ideas.

NYU Stern School of Business professor Arun Sundararajan is excited about the sharing economy. Although the sharing economy presents challenges for both corporations and start-up peer-to-peer marketplaces, Sundararajan sees a host of benefits for what he calls “micro entrepreneurs.” In an interview, Sundararajan discusses the challenges of ensuring success with this alternative business model — and steps companies can take to make sure they’re not left out.

An emergent defensive strategy is being used by both upstart players facing established competitors and by newcomers (such as Tesla, Airbnb, and Uber) facing government regulators. Called “lawsourcing,” the strategy advances legal and public relations goals through social media campaigns, online petitions, and boycotts to draw attention to disputes. These tactics are often framed in moral and ethical terms, and they are being initiated by even very small players.

“The notion that we were going to crowdsource certain functions really was unheard of,” says Donna Cuomo of the nonprofit MITRE, a $1.4 billion nonprofit R&D organization. A social business tool it developed called Handshake is helping make that kind of virtual collaboration happen. In a Q&A, Dr. Cuomo and MITRE colleagues Laurie Damianos and Stan Drozdetski explain how Handshake has influenced business at MITRE and what challenges they’ve faced in its implementation.

Using its own version of open innovation called Connect + Develop, Procter & Gamble is now accessing externally developed intellectual property to accelerate internal innovation. Its Live Well Collaborative, for instance, was founded by Procter & Gamble and the University of Cincinnati with the goal of specializing in research and development of products and services for the 50+ market.

Online crowdsourcing platforms are growing at double-digit rates and are starting to attract the attention of large companies. Just as cloud computing offers unconstrained access to processing capacity and storage, the “human cloud” promises to connect businesses to millions of workers on tap, ready to perform tasks and solve problems that range from the simple to the complex. The article explores four new human cloud models: The Facilitator model, The Arbitrator, The Aggregator, The Governor.

Top data scientists often share three characteristics: they are creative, they are curious and they are competitive. Anthony Goldbloom, CEO of Kaggle, a company that hosts data prediction competitions, has figured out how to tap all three of these characteristics to help companies crowdsource their analytics problems.

Full text of papers presented at last week’s Collective Intelligence 2012 conference at MIT are now online and available for downloading.

A new approach to modern scholarship, called crowd science or citizen science and utilizing volunteers from around the world, turns science into games. Already it is making contributions to the science of ecology, medicine and astronomy.

A New Yorker story says that Facebook is trying to come up with an approach to organizing the Internet that’s entirely different from what Google has done, guiding you through the preferences of your friends.

Social networking inside Tata Consultancy Services helps people access the full breadth of the organization’s collective intelligence in lightening speed, says K. Ananth Krishnan, TCS’s chief technology officer.

This 2010 article explores how large, loosely organized groups of people are working together electronically in surprisingly effective ways — sometimes without even knowing it. To take advantage of the new possibilities and potential of collective intelligence, managers need a deep understanding of how these systems work. The authors employ an analogy from biology and call the building blocks that are combined and recombined in various ways the “genes” of collective intelligence systems.

What’s “crowd funding”? It involves consumers investing small amounts of money (as little as $1) in businesses whose products they fancy.

In the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, Eric Bonabeau looks at not only the appeal of collective intelligence but also the practical issues managers need to consider to use it successfully.

Innovation prizes are “experiencing a resurgence,” writes Jaison G. Morgan in a recent article in the journal Innovations.

Information markets, wikis and other applications that tap into the collective intelligence of groups have recently generated tremendous interest. But what”s the reality behind the hype?