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Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business | 
 enlarge | Author: Jeff Howe
Publisher: Crown Business
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $13.20
You Save: $13.75 (51%)
New (39) Used (9) from $13.20
Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 57172
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0307396207
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.4058
EAN: 9780307396204
ASIN: 0307396207
Publication Date: August 26, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
“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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
Good book in the vein of Wisdom of Crowds December 24, 2008
This is a good book that essentially makes the point that the public at large really makes the decisions that affect business. The Wisdom of Crowds is a book that covers most of the same ground but in a better theoretical means.
 Crowdsourcing December 17, 2008
There are few book that actually exceed your expectations, this is one of them. If you are at all interested in the future, and trends and how you might find you place in it, I would recommend this book.
 Fascinating topic but disappointing book December 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In his prescient 2006 article in Wired, Jeff Howe coined the term "crowdsourcing" to describe how the Internet has enabled large, distributed teams of amateurs to do work that was previously the domain of isolated experts or corporations. Linux and Wikipedia are only two of hundreds of examples of this phenomenon. Howe's article in Wired focused on two innovative companies who had successfully harnessed the power of crowdsourcing: iStockphoto, a community-driven source for stock photography, and InnoCentive, where corporations offer cash prizes for solving their thorniest research and development problems. Two years later, Howe has expanded his article into a 300-page book.
I'm a fan of Wired, and this is the kind of book I would normally love, but in this case I found myself disappointed. If you've already read Howe's article in Wired, and indeed if you are the kind of person who reads Wired, you won't find much that is new or surprising here. Howe fills up his 300 pages by repeating the same examples over and over. For example, we learn that iStockphoto is so cool that Getty Images finally bought them out. It's a nice story, but Howe can't resist telling it in what seems like every chapter. If you sometimes feel like you're reading the same sentence twice, that's because you are. Here's Howe on page 134 describing "idea jams": "People have pointed out that this is little more than an Internet-enabled suggestion box. Just so. The Internet didn't make crowdsourcing possible--it just made it vastly more effective." A nice observation, but then the identical sentences appear again on page 159. This kind of editorial sloppiness abounds. On page 51, Howe mangles the the recursive acronym of the GNU project. On page 237, he repeats the widely believed but false claim that Xerox PARC invented the computer mouse (it was SRI).
Howe proudly announces that this book itself was "crowdsourced"--he put drafts on his website for the crowd to critique and edit. He probably should have hired a professional editor instead, who would have cut it in half and made it a great book.
Interesting November 30, 2008
The book is written from a journalist view and provides a good overview of the core principals of crowdsoucing using examples from companies that successfully use crowdsoucing. However, the conclusion conclusion was rather abstract and left me wanting more.
Interesting anecdotes on crowdsourcing November 29, 2008
Finished this book up earlier this week and I have to say, I'm a bit disappointed. I feel as though a book by the man who defined the word `crowdsourcing' shouald give me more than just anecdotes about how companies have used crowdsourcing.
I'm not disappointed in the content of the book...it was good. As was the writing. I can't quite put my finger on it but I felt like something was missing. The book is interesting and a good read...but left me looking for more.
That said, there are some excellent stories of companies using crowdsourcing. There is some excellent ideas is this book, but very little actionable information. Well...except for the last chapter. The last chapter provides some `meat' to the ideas behind crowdsourcing.
Before someone jumps on me for giving this book a bad review...I'm not doing that. I think people should pick up this book and read it, if only for the stories of iStockPhoto and other companies that have used crowdsourcing models.
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