This book disrupts the way practitioners and academic scholars think about crowds
crowdsourcing innovation and new organizational forms in this emerging period of ubiquitous
access to the internet. The authors argue that the current approach to crowdsourcing
unnecessarily limits the crowd to offering ideas locking out those of us with knowledge about
a problem. They use data from 25 case studies of flash crowds - anonymous strangers answering
online announcements to participate in a 7-10 day innovation challenge - half of whom were
unleashed from the limitations of focusing on ideas. Yet these crowds were able to develop new
business models new product lines and offer useful solutions to global problems in fields as
diverse as health care insurance software development and societal change. This book which
offers a theory of collective production of innovative solutions explaining the practices that
the crowds organically followed will revolutionize current assumptions about how innovation
and crowdsourcing should be managed for commercial as well as societal purposes.
