The creativity of crowds

My first exposure to the idea of crowds was Elias Canetti's book, Crowds and Power. Although, as an undergraduate, I was fascinated by the enthusiasm of the left-leaning Politics 101 lecturer (replete with a woolly turtle-neck pullover), Canetti's study of crowd behaviour as it manifests itself in human activities ranging from mob violence to religious congregations and football fan behaviour in stadiums did not seem to have any resonance beyond intellectual curiosity.

But, of late, I have been very interested in a different type of crowd. A virtual crowd. A virtual crowd that has commercial possibilities.

In an post that I did some months ago, I highlighted a Time article on the phenomenon of crowdfunding which has helped charities and political activity (the greatest example being Barack Obama's presidential campaign). Certain political parties in Malaysia are probably cluey about this fundraising methodology.

Crowdsourcing

I was even more intrigued to read in Forbes about the phenomenon of crowdsourcing. I looked it up and here's what Wiki has to say about it:

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data.

The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. Problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. Users--also known as the crowd--typically form into online communities, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place--the crowdsourcer--and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded. In some cases, this labor is well compensated, either monetarily, with prizes, or with recognition. In other cases, the only rewards may be kudos or intellectual satisfaction. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time, or from experts or small businesses which were unknown to the initiating organization.

Perceived benefits of crowdsourcing include:

• Problems can be explored at comparatively little cost, and often very quickly.
• Payment is by results.
• The organization can tap a wider range of talent than might be present in its own organization.

The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific other body. The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that open source production is a cooperative activity initiated and voluntarily undertaken by members of the public. In crowdsourcing the activity is initiated by a client and the work may be undertaken on an individual, as well as a group, basis.

CrowdSpring.com
The article I read in Forbes focuses on a company called CrowdSpring.com, which allows buyers to run competitions for company logos, Web sites, T-shirts and the like. For buyers of designs, that means more choice at a fraction of the cost of hiring designers.

For aspiring designers, it means a shot at stealing work from entrenched design firms.

This is a win-win proposition.

Applicability to Malaysia 

I see this as an opportunity. Malaysia has so many colourful communities. Our culture is so varied and colourful. The designs of batik, songket, wood carvings and dresses are wonderfully creative and intricate. 

What we need to do, is to replicate all this Malaysian creativity from the physical world into the virtual world.  

What we need are technopreneurial talents that can connect Malaysian cottage industries with the greater world of commerce by matching buyers with designers.

This can be done from the comfort of our homes. It has very low entry cost. All it needs are technopreneurs to provide the hosting and, creative Malaysians to present their works for each area of work.

Rather than me boring you further, click on the link to CrowdSpring.com and let me know what you think.

Malaysia and Crowdsourcing

C'mon Malaysia. Crowdsourcing is the one area that that is a fieldflattener. I say again, all you need is the right skill sets for any projects that are structured for crowdsourcing.

Sign up and, you are part of a global team. Wonderful and easy. All you need is to have the correct skill sets.

And....I believe that the universal language between boundaries is ENGLISH. I repeat, ENGLISH.

Here's an extract of a Businessweek piece, Pushing the Limits of Crowdsourcing for your reference:

From around the world, almost 20,000 people chipped in on a five-minute animated film that features a love story between a guitar and a violin. You could have been one of them. All you needed was a Facebook account and an itch for computer-generated animation. The Mass Animation project, led by Yair Landau, is showing how much further crowdsourcing can go, and how traditional production methods may get left behind.

David Perry is also pushing the limits, and expectations, of just what's possible by tapping the brainpower of the multitude. Project Top Secret, which Perry began in early 2007, has elicited contributions from 60,000 people who have signed in to help create a giant multiplayer online game. Like Landau, Perry is a novice in his new creative role. Both still have their day jobs: Landau, 45, is head of Bedouin Media, a production company; Perry, 41, runs Gameconsultants.com. And both claim their concepts have proven wildly successful. So how did they do it?

After seven years as president of Sony Digital Pictures (SNE), Landau didn't need to take a big jump to launchMass Animation, a three-way partnership of Intel (INTL), Dell (DELL), and Facebook. He got interested after a friend at Facebook told him how easily Facebook was able totranslate its Web site into different languages by simply letting users do the work. Facebook, meantime, was interested in seeing what other crowdsourcing projects it could come up with. Familiar with Landau's work in digital movies, Facebook approached Landau about crowdsourcing a movie via its site and Live Music, the animated tale, was born in Los Angeles.

HARNESSING GROUP POWER

Perry, a 26-year veteran of the video-game industry with several No. 1 titles under his belt, was looking for ways to include the video-game community into the production of games. Working with Acclaim Entertainment, the Beverly Hills resident had also seen how crowdsourcing made translation easier: On their own, users would record game dialogue in different languages. Perry and Acclaim figured gamers could do much more. On a plane ride from Korea to the U.S. in November 2006, Perry and Acclaim Chief Executive Howard Marks agreed to launch a contest that would crowdsource a full-fledged game. "We just decided to give them the rope to let them hang themselves," he laughs. In early 2007, Project Top Secretbegan.

Landau and Facebook spent less than $250,000 creating the Mass Animation application that would run on the site and host the entire contest. It was built by AniBOOM and SpreadApp and designed by Noise New York. Autodesk (ADSK) was brought in to provide a trial version of the industry-popular Maya animation software. To help users along, Landau created storyboards, character models, and broke the movie into 107 shots for the crowd to animate.

Within two months, 50,000 people became "fans" of the project on Facebook. A third of them stepped up to either animate a segment, uploading QuickTime video files to the Facebook app, or vote on submissions through the application or by creating their own fan pages. In the end, people from 101 countries contributed animated shots. Each person with a winning clip won $500. In addition, Dell and Intel, which used the contest to promote its Core i7 processor, gave away a Dell Studio XPS computer every week. In all, the sponsors spent about $1 million and eight months on the project. Landau says producing the same five minutes of film by traditional methods would have cost millions more and taken at least six months longer.

Read more here.

C'mon Malaysia! Let's get onto the global bandwagon at a faster click.

Crowdfunding

This is a fundraising method that is applicable to any kind of political cause, social programmes or business start-ups. It's an interesting fundraising-cum-business model that may carve out a place in small and medium scale enterprises (SME) even in Malaysia. What is needed is a credible entity to be the host or convenor to introduce the project and invite Netizens to participate. Something interesting for us all to think about and work on. Read this piece from Time:

Politicians do it. Charities too. And now for-profit entrepreneurs are tapping the Internet to get small amounts of money from lots and lots of supporters. One part social networking and one part capital accumulation, crowdfunding websites seek to harness the enthusiasm--and pocket money--of virtual strangers, promising them a cut of the returns.

Like a homespun IPO,CatwalkGenius.com helps hoi polloi bankroll upstart fashion designers. British documentary filmmaker Franny Armstrong raised more than £450,000 ($815,000) to finance--and work full time on--The Age of Stupid, which she hopes will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. People who gave 20 quid ($35) got a credit on the film's website; those who gave £5,000 ($9,000) and up will get a percentage of the profits, if there are any.

The term crowdfunding derives from another neologism: crowdsourcing, i.e., outsourcing to the public jobs typically performed by employees. Want to start a T-shirt business? Why not have the masses submit designs (crowdsourcing) and finance the ones they like (crowdfunding)? That's whatCameesa.com is doing, in a fashion-forward knockoff ofThreadless.com which generated $17 million in revenues in 2006 by having the crowd choose T-shirt designs. "If you put money down to support a design, that's a strong indicator of actual demand," says Cameesa founder Andrew Cronk, a programmer in Chicago. In other words, the folks who fund your venture double as a first-rate focus group.

Likewise, SellaBand.com connects music lovers with unsigned artists looking to record albums. It's a way to bypass the labels; groupies can now fill that role. Musicians have profiles with bios and songs, and as soon as they sell 5,000 shares, at $10 a pop, it's time to head to the recording studio. In two years, more than 30,000 people have ponied up more than $2.5 million, and 25 musicians have cut or are cutting albums. So far, the average return on each $10 investment is about $2.50 from CD sales and ads. The money gets split among the artist, SellaBand and the artist's "believers"--an apt description for those who contributed. "People become emotionally invested as part of a team," says Mark Maclaine, bassist in the British band Second Person, which in six months raised $50,000 from 741 investors and has since had its video featured on VH1 UK and MTV UK. "Right now things are going really well," says Maclaine, who is warily pursuing music full time. "Maybe I'll be working in Wal-Mart in a few months." But at least 741 people are betting he won't be.

Designing the Future of Business

I am aware that many blog surfers roll their eye-balls into the high heavens when the see the type of posting that I'm making here. This is the type of posting where I adopt and paste, wholesale, entire articles that I regard as being of relevance to me and other Malaysians. So, bear with me.

My increasing emphasis on design and innovation is based on a basic set of premises which I truly believe in:

Field-flattening
Design and innovation is what I regard as a field-flattener (a phrase I am inventing). What do I mean? The phrase is a play on the expression, level playing field.

In other words, with sufficient technical training and exposure (especially via the Internet), Malaysians endowed with imagination can think up designs for products and processes that have commercial application and value.

You don't need excessive government grants. You just need a PC or latop for Internet connectivity. You just need a good sketch pad or any piece of paper.

I have earlier written about crowdsourcing. So, there are actually channels whereby Malaysian creativity can find a global marketplace via crowdsourcing. You don't need to lobby for a meeting with Ministers for grants.

Even if you are a Kelabit Malaysian living in the Bario Highlands of Sarawak, you can be part of the global marketplace for industrial design. Create a viable design and put it out there.

Translating innate artistry into industrial designs
As I have written earlier, inspiration and impulse can come from anything around us.

I don't have such talents. But, I know that in places like Limkokwing and One Academy or, even, Central Market KL, just to name three places, there are incredible creative talent in Malaysia being showcased. These talents can be directed towards commercial and industrial application, not just for portrait and landscape painting or graphic arts.

Anyway, in case you think I am being crazy again, read this rather long piece by Marty Neumeier that I plucked from Businessweek. It's really worth a read. For the speed-readers, I have taken the liberty to highlight in bold the passages that caught my eye:

Forget total quality. Forget top-down strategy. Design is the engine that can transform a company into a powerhouse of nonstop innovation

Imagine a crazy wonderland where most of what you learned in business school is either upside down or backward. A land where customers control the company, jobs are avenues of self-expression, the barriers to competition are out of your control, strangers design your products, fewer features are better, advertising drives customers away, demographics are beside the point, whatever you sell you take back, and best practices are obsolete at birth. Meaning talks, money walks, and stability is fantasy. Talent trumps obedience, imagination beats knowledge, and empathy trounces logic.

If you've been paying close attention, you don't have to imagine this scenario. You see it forming all around you. The only question is whether you can change your business, your brand, and your thinking fast enough to take full advantage of it.

Designing the Way Forward

Until now, companies have used design as a beauty station for identities and communications, or as the last stop in a product launch. Never has it been used for its potential to create rule-bending innovation across the board. Meanwhile, the public is developing a healthy appetite for all things design.

A 2007 survey by Kelton Research for Autodesk (ADSK) found that when seven in 10 Americans recalled the last time they saw a product they just had to have, it was because of design. The survey found that among younger people (18 to 29 years old), the influence of design was even more pronounced. In Britain, a recent survey by the Design Council found that 16% of British businesses say design tops their list of key success factors. Among "rapidly growing" businesses, no fewer than 47% rank it first.

The ballooning demand for design is shaped by a profound shift in how the First World makes its living. Creativity in its various forms has become the No. 1 engine of economic growth. The creative class, in the words of University of Toronto professor Richard Florida, now comprises 38 million members, or more than 30% of the American workforce. McKinsey & Co. authors Lowell Bryan and Claudia Joyce put the figure only slightly below, at 25%. They cite creative professionals in financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment who act as agents of change, producers of intangible assets, and creators of new value for their companies.

But when you hear the phrase "innovative design," what picture comes to mind? An iPhone? A Nintendo Wii? A Prius? Most people visualize some kind of technology product. Yet products—technological or otherwise—are not the only possibilities for design. Design is rapidly moving from posters and toasters to include processes, systems, and organizations. Design is the accelerator for the company car, the power train for sustainable profits. Design drives innovation, innovation powers brand, brand builds loyalty, and loyalty sustains profits. If you want long-term profits, don't start with technology—start with design.

Brand and Deliver

A former editor of Windows magazine, Mike Elgan, illustrated the difference between ordinary brands and charismatic brands in two succinct sentences: "Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer is famous for a crazy video in which he yells, "I—love—this—company!" In the case of Apple (AAPL), it's the customers who shout that."

In the previous century, a little brand loyalty went a long way. Often, what passed for loyalty was merely ignorance. If customers didn't know what their options were, they would stick with the devil they knew. Today's Microsoft may be one of the last major companies to profit this way. In the new century, customer ignorance won't be enough to keep competitors at bay.

Agility Beats Ownership

Today, there's no safe ground in business. The old barriers to competition—ownership of factories, access to capital, technology patents, regulatory protection, distribution choke holds, customer ignorance—are rapidly collapsing. In our Darwinian era of perpetual innovation, we're either commoditizing or revolutionizing.

Why does change always have to be crisis-driven? Is it possible to change ahead of the curve? What keeps companies from the continuous transformation needed to keep up with the speed of the market?

A company can't will itself to be agile. Agility is an emergent property that appears when an organization has the right mindset, the right skills, and the ability to multiply those skills through collaboration. To count agility as a core competence, you have to embed it into the culture. You have to encourage an enterprisewide appetite for radical ideas. You have to keep the company in a constant state of inventiveness. It's one thing to inject a company with inventiveness. It's another thing to build a company on inventiveness.

To organize for agility, your company needs to develop a "designful mind." A designful mind confers the ability to invent the widest range of solutions for the wicked problems now facing your company, your industry, and your world.

Next, Eco-Everything

Necessity may well be the mother of invention. But if we continue to manufacture mountains of toxic stuff, invention may soon become the mother of necessity. Our natural resources will disappear and our planet made uninhabitable.

As a thought experiment, imagine a future in which all companies were compelled to take back every product they made. How would that change their behavior? For starters, they would make their products with parts they could salvage and reuse at the end of their lifecycles. This, in turn, would spawn whole industries dedicated to the design of reusable materials. As companies struggled to afford the full cost of manufacturing, the prices of products and services would rise. To keep prices under control, companies would localize their operations to save on transportation costs. Localizing businesses would change the nature of communities, creating a network of quasi-independent economies more akin to the Agricultural Age than to the Industrial Age.

In Germany, Volkswagen (VOWG) is demonstrating that corporate responsibility doesn't end at the loading dock. The company is already selling cars that are 85% recyclable and 95% reusable, and it's building a zero-emissions car that operates on a fuel cell, 12 batteries, and a solar panel instead of fossil fuels.

While eco-sustainability isn't yet top-of-mind for most CEOs, when the tide finally turns, it'll turn fast. There's already a significant migration of talented executives from traditional technology to green technology. As venture capitalist Adam Grosser puts it: "They have had their consciousness energized, and they believe there is a lot of money to be made."

Business is Design Blind

Until a decade or so ago, the public's taste for design had been stunted by the limitations of mass production. Now people have more buying choices, so they're choosing in favor of beauty, simplicity, and the "tribal identity" of their favorite brands.

Yet if design is such a powerful tool, why aren't more practitioners working in corporations? If economic value increasingly derives from such intangibles as knowledge, inspiration, and creativity, why don't we hear the language of design echoing down the corridors?

Unfortunately, most business managers are deaf, dumb, and blind when it comes to the creative process. They learned their chops by rote, through a bounded tradition of spreadsheet-based theory. As one MBA joked, in his world, the language of design is a sound only dogs can hear.

For businesses to bottle the kind of experiences that rivet minds and run away with hearts, not just one time but over and over, they'll need to do more than hire designers. They'll need to be designers. They'll need to think like designers, feel like designers, work like designers. The narrow-gauge mindset of the past is insufficient for today's wicked problems. We can no longer play the music as written. Instead, we have to invent a whole new scale.

Even the government can innovate

This may be hard to imagine in Malaysia at this point. But, we can hope...

Vivek Kundra, the first-ever federal Chief information Officer in the U.S., is serious about bringing the latest Net technologies to the federal government. In his first one-on-one interview since being named to his post, the 34-year-old native of India told BusinessWeek he hopes to transform the way the government uses technology.

He plans on making it more efficient by getting agencies to share information and computers. And he'll use social networking Web sites to open a conversation between the government and citizens. He also believes government should no longer build all of its computing systems and Web sites from scratch, the way it has in the past. "I want to make sure we're leveraging innovations from throughout the world," he says.

Some U.S. business leaders also praise Kundra's affection for so-called cloud computing. Rather than each department of government having its own data centers, he wants departments to share large clusters of computers (known in the industry as "clouds") so they can squeeze more efficiency out of them. He also recognises the potential of Crowdsourcing, a phenomenon that I have blogged about on a few occasions.

Can Malaysia take advantage of the evolution and leapfrog into the future at a faster click?

By the way, Vivek Kundra is literally a pendatang to the U.S. It doesn't seem to bother them.

Read his brief biography here. He's quite a guy.

An eBay For Innovation

Here's one crazy crowdsourcing/crowdfunding concept that works as a bulletin board cum research prize. It is a completely merit-based, populist omnibus approach to getting a piece of research put out into the Internet for anyone who is interested to either pose a challenge or, post a solution. The prize money is funded by netizens. The judge is the person who posed the challenge.

If you think this is crazy, you may be correct. But, then again, you may be wrong. Read these swatches from the Forbes piece and think again...

What if you don't have millions of dollars to offer yet have a problem you want solved? A new Web site called ChallengePost aims to fill the gap between the small goals and the lofty ambitions of X Prize Foundation. Started in New York City by 35-year-old former record label owner Brandon Kessler, ChallengePost gives anyone the ability to establish a goal, rally a community around it and raise funds with which to reward winners.
......

But ChallengePost's Kessler is hoping his site will collect a wider range of challenges and prize-linked innovation goals by simplifying and democratizing the process. Anyone can post a challenge directly on the site, and visitors can give their thumbs-up to a cause or pledge money to build up a prize even if they haven't a clue how to solve the problem. Users can also share their activity on the site with friends through social networking sites.

Kessler sees the site as a great marketing vehicle for brands that want to connect with their customers' altruism. A company such as Dell ( DELL - news - people ) or Starbucks ( SBUX - news - people ) could, for example, issue a challenge to come up with ways to reduce their packaging costs. (Neither have signed up with ChallengePost yet.) ChallengePost is working with several companies and already has a deal with ad agency Deutsch Inc.

ChallengePost plans to make money by charging an 8% fee off the amount of any prize solved, and it negotiates separate, flat fees with companies that post or sponsor a challenge. Any intellectual property generated by the solutions is public domain by default, but challengers can retain property rights if they wish. If someone finds an existing solution to a prize-attached challenge, no one gets any money.

Kessler became interested in the idea of building a Web site to aggregate innovation challenges back in 2006, when he caught wind of a project called Windows on a Mac, which sought to reward anyone who could make the Microsoft Windows operating system run on the new Intel-based ( INTC - news - people ) Apple Macintosh computers. The sponsor of the contest ended up raising $14,000 from strangers sending him money through PayPal. The problem was solved in three weeks, months before Apple released its own software to run Windows. That software solution never became a commercial product, but it "showed how much action and involvement a challenge could inspire," says Kessler.

Visit ChallengePost and start thinking out of the box. You might make some money, too. Great innovation, great model to stimulate innovation and, potentially, a great way to make some money.