Continuing to riff off of interesting TED videos – I present this one from Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine fame. By the way, I download TED videos to my iPhone and listen to them while I mow the lawn every weekend. Multitasking is my thing…  To sum up what Chris is saying, online video and sites like YouTube are creating a new dynamic that humanity has not seen to this point – the speeding up of innovation based on the fact that people can instantly watch what other people around the world are doing in any specific discipline. He uses the example of dancing by showing how dancers can get online and see new innovations from all over the world and then incorporate, and expand those ideas into new forms at an ever-increasing rate. By having the ability to peruse fifty different dancers doing their unique spins in a few hours, it is possible to mash-up ideas and create something yet again innovative in some new way.

The concept of crowd accelerated innovation works when any new idea inspires ones mind in a new direction, and then goes ballistic when it is more than one idea in a field that joins the idea recipe in quick succession. This blog is an example because I have been studying the field of crowd dynamics for a couple of years, and in quick succession I saw Chris’s TED video, and read a few articles about the wisdom of crowds, and the various outstanding results people are getting with crowsdsourcing work. I have been inspired! I have been inspired to create my own branded concepts around crowd dynamics. Possibly by reading these, you will be led to further innovations and we can be a good case study for Mr. Anderson. Hey, that reminds me a bit of a Matrix scene… Don’t worry if you don’t get that reference.

Crowd Inspired Mash-ups – A variation of the crowd accelerated innovation concept could be the Crowd Inspired Mashup. In this case, we throw a challenge out to the crowd and the solution could form in real time. Groups of people could add their own unique pieces to the solutions, or project and it literally forms a mash-up of ideas or results. This could be a story, a song, a business plan, or large problem. The core dynamic is that the crowd can add, subtract, or enhance pieces of the solution as opposed to producing the solution on their own. I suppose this is what I am trying to do with the Crowdscribed publishing label we are going to start to do crowdsourced books. This is also not a new concept in that many discussion groups play the role of a small crowd that mashes up ideas until they reach a conclusion. I just see if being able to be done on a much larger scale soon.

Crowd Driven Productivity – As companies move more towards using virtual teams and contractors to perform labor, the concept of Crowd Driven Productivity could become all the rage. Imagine if you will that organizations make the decision to outsource many functions that are not core to the business, but are still needed. Oh, we are already doing that… So then imagine that the outsource agent is the crowd itself. In other words, a company creates a portal that houses a collection of tasks that need to be done that day with bounties attached to each. Every day, a new list of tasks gets posted. On the other side of that there is a crowd of workers that monitors many organizations work portals looking for tasks that they are suited to perform. When they get a hit for their talents, they accept the project and do the work. The company only pays when the work is done to their satisfaction. The law of supply and demand would work here in spades because the more you offer in bounties, the more chance you will have that the work gets done fast and with high quality. The company always has a choice as to the risk level they want to take on performance versus the cost to get the work done. In some ways, this is what Amazon in doing today with their Mturk.com site.

Crowd Mandated Penalties – In the world of online reputation, it is becoming clear that the crowd will have the power to decimate the sales pipeline of company if they want to post enough negative ratings or comments. With the trend growing of rating sites for every profession and industry, it is clear that people will one day soon check online before hiring ANY type of service, professional or vendor (check out angieslist.com if you have not seen it yet.) Think about what systems like Yelp are already doing for restaurants. I have been flummoxed over the last few months as to how large organizations have had the ability to provide horrible customer service and still exist. I have also wondered how poor performing doctors and lawyers continue to find patients and clients. The reason is that there are always more people that have no idea what they are going to be getting from these providers. This will end soon, and it will end because the generation coming up will be so trained to check the Web to see what others think of any service provider, and when they see bad reviews, they will not do business with them. That simple. In other words, we will see Crowd Mandated Penalties for service providers that suck and abuse people – as it should be!! This is called performance transparency and the ultimate outcome will be better service for all and I love that thought.

The Wisdom of Crowds – This is not one of my concepts of course, but this blog is about crowd dynamics so I have to at least mention that we have seen that in many cases the crowd has collective wisdom and this can be tapped in order to get quick answers to questions. This only works when the crowd has access to the facts, or to the underlying knowledge somewhere alone the line. I have a strong suspicion that sites like Yahoo Answers was just the tip of the iceberg in this concept. Instead of asking the crowd to answer one question at a time for one person at a time, it will be interesting when we have the ability to ask a very large crowd pretty complex questions and get powerful and quick answers. For example, what if we could ask the crowd the following list of questions and let the crowd form answers through posting, editing, modifying, and reposting:

• How can we rebuild the education system in the U.S?
• How can we stop terrorism?
• How can the U.S. provide healthcare in a fair way?
• What are the best techniques for raising kids in a digital age?

Would there be a bloody battle of competing ideas to solve these tough issues? Sure. Would people passionately defend their beliefs? Yes. Could we actually get to better solutions than what our military, government, and the lobbyists might get to? Uh, I think so. The older I get, the more I marvel at what goes on with the politics behind improving questions like the ones above. The crowd has a unique perspective and ability to address questions like this without the same level of unhealthy influences that exist with policy makers today.

As mentioned earlier, this line of thinking is an example of crowd accelerated innovation because I am standing on the shoulders of other people who have published the foundation of ideas that started me down this road. Maybe the bottom line is that we have always stood on the shoulders of others as we learned from the people that documented knowledge for us to digest later. What is clearly different now is that we can digest information and new ideas at the speed of the Web and at our own tolerance level for shoving new content into our brains. This will indeed change the speed that humanity progresses, and that is a big deal!!!

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com