July 17, 2007 at 08:53Crowdsourcing has proven effective in business
Crowdsoursing is the use of the collective mind of thousands of people, including their labor, for commercial purposes.
Inspired by the success of crowdsourcing in the software industry (open source movement), businessmen in a wide variety of industries - journalism, music, biotechnology, chip design - are trying to use free or cheap crowd labor. One of the uses of crowdsourcing has been found in the pharmaceutical industry. Large corporations thus cheapen the development of new drugs. In an interview with a citizen journalist, Alpheus Bingham, a former head of R&D services at pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and co-founder of Innocentive crowdsourcing company, talks about this.. This is a fairly well-known company, which gives the solution of complex R & D problems to the "torn to pieces" to the general public, offering cash prizes to the one who will be the first to solve the problem.
Innocentive integrates crowdsourcing in the R&D process, as well as in other areas of the economy and business. True, big business has not yet recognized it as a reliable assistant, so Innocentive has to constantly prove the effectiveness of a new approach to scientific research. And they succeed well. Recently, the authoritative magazine Harvard Business Review has written about Innocentive .
The article provides some interesting numbers. For example, a clear evidence that crowdsourcing is more effective than regular R&D developments is a 30% figure - just the number of tasks that full-time research scientists could not solve were successfully solved by outsiders.
One can imagine how in the future setting tasks for crowdsourcing, publishing them on the Internet and giving out prize money will be automated and carried out using a software agent that is programmed to fulfill a specific goal. If the publication and transfer of money is anonymous, the tasks may also be criminal in nature, especially since the issuance of remuneration is not a prerequisite for successful crowdsourcing. A classic example is from Stirling with automatic tracking of the frequency of mentioning politicians in the press and placing an order to eliminate those who are beginning to gain in popularity and overcome a certain border.
via Wired
Inspired by the success of crowdsourcing in the software industry (open source movement), businessmen in a wide variety of industries - journalism, music, biotechnology, chip design - are trying to use free or cheap crowd labor. One of the uses of crowdsourcing has been found in the pharmaceutical industry. Large corporations thus cheapen the development of new drugs. In an interview with a citizen journalist, Alpheus Bingham, a former head of R&D services at pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and co-founder of Innocentive crowdsourcing company, talks about this.. This is a fairly well-known company, which gives the solution of complex R & D problems to the "torn to pieces" to the general public, offering cash prizes to the one who will be the first to solve the problem.
Innocentive integrates crowdsourcing in the R&D process, as well as in other areas of the economy and business. True, big business has not yet recognized it as a reliable assistant, so Innocentive has to constantly prove the effectiveness of a new approach to scientific research. And they succeed well. Recently, the authoritative magazine Harvard Business Review has written about Innocentive .
The article provides some interesting numbers. For example, a clear evidence that crowdsourcing is more effective than regular R&D developments is a 30% figure - just the number of tasks that full-time research scientists could not solve were successfully solved by outsiders.
One can imagine how in the future setting tasks for crowdsourcing, publishing them on the Internet and giving out prize money will be automated and carried out using a software agent that is programmed to fulfill a specific goal. If the publication and transfer of money is anonymous, the tasks may also be criminal in nature, especially since the issuance of remuneration is not a prerequisite for successful crowdsourcing. A classic example is from Stirling with automatic tracking of the frequency of mentioning politicians in the press and placing an order to eliminate those who are beginning to gain in popularity and overcome a certain border.
via Wired