Why Designers Hate Crowdsourcing - Forbes.com

SAN FRANCISCO -- Mix crowdsourcing, the Internet and a huge pool of underemployed graphic designers, and the outcome is a company that's grabbed a great deal of attention. In the two and a half years since it launched, Web startup 99designs out of Melbourne, Australia, boasts that it's helped to broker 48,000 graphic design projects for big name clients like Adidas and DISH Network as well as for thousands of small businesses. Acting as a middleman between business owners and graphic designers, the 99designs site hosts contests in which clients post their needs--website design, logos, print packages--and designers compete to fill them. Instead of bidding for the job, designers submit finished work tailored to the client specifications in the contest listing. 99designs calls it a win-win scenario: Its clients gain access to the site's pool of 73,000 active designers, while the designers are given a chance to compete for "upwards of $600,000 in awards paid out monthly."

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Devising An Opera On-line Using Crowdsourcing.

This is one of the most creative online endeavours I have seen - devising an opera on line using the crowdsourcing method. It is worth just visiting the web site to watch the project unfold.

Question the Wisdom of Experts: Unlearning 101: - Jack Uldrich

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” John Cage Question: Write the letter “E” on your forehead. (Go ahead, I’ll wait. You may also just trace the letter on your forehead if that’s more comfortable for you). Did you write the letter in a self-oriented fashion such that it would appear backwards to those viewing it or did you write it backwards so that it would appear legible to others? In a fascinating study conducted by Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Galinsky and his colleagues found that the more power an individual possessed, the more likely the person was to draw the letter from their perspective -- making it appear backwards to others. In fact, individuals assigned to a high power group were three times more likely to draw a self-oriented “E.” The study concluded that power caused individuals to assign too much weight to their own viewpoint and made them less able to adjust to, or even consider, another person’s perspective.

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One Size Does Not Fit All in Innovation (and Never Will) - Roberto Verganti - Harvard Business Review

I'm worried that the discussion about innovation is losing its vitality and that a handful of beliefs are becoming dangerous dogmas. Two that worry me the most are: Innovation and design should be user-centered — i.e., users are the first and foremost source of insights. Innovation processes should, therefore, start from observation of mainstream or extreme users. The crowd outperforms the elite — i.e., thanks to the web, firms may now leverage the power of communities of scientists, creatives, and users to develop innovations. Many ideas from large communities are better than a good idea from an outstanding innovation team. In a recent blog, I questioned the universal effectiveness of user-centered processes. My point was that user-centered innovation is ineffective to deal with environmental sustainability. I was surprised to notice that instead of focusing on the specific subject at hand (sustainability), many of the people who participated in the discussion defended user-centricity as an incontrovertible principle.

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Why Crowd-wisdom fails businesses

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki popularized the notion that, under the right conditions, canvassing the aggregate opinions of many people could be more efficient than relying on the expertise of a few. Jeff Howe applied this approach to decision-making using the buzzword ‘crowdsourcing’ in a Wired article in October 2006. Crowdsourcing assumes that customers know best what they want and need. Hence, more heads are better than one. We discuss why crowdsourcing may fail in a few important situations that concern social media.

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