Harnessing The Power Of The Crowd

The Age

Saturday December 20, 2008

Jim Murphy, Reviewer

Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business

By Jeff Howe, Random House Business Books, $34.95.

JEFF Howe, a contributing editor at Wired magazine, has extended an article he wrote for the magazine's June 2006 issue into a full-length book extolling the virtues of what he calls "crowdsourcing".

Crowdsourcing is the idea that the connecting power of the internet enables masses of people to solve problems that would take any given individual far longer or too long.

For instance, in 2000 in Chicago, Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart set up an online T-shirt design competition whose winners would be decided not by a panel of judges but by the community of designers themselves.

The result: a steady supply of fresh, original T-shirts that began outselling established brands and by 2006 was generating $US17 million in revenue for Jake and Jacob's company, Threadless.com.

From this, Howe did not deduce Threadless was an outstanding seller of T-shirts but an outstanding seller of community. Threadless' founders did not set out to maximise profits or "exploit the efficiencies created by the internet. They just wanted to make a cool website where people who liked the stuff they liked would feel at home," writes Howe.

In achieving this modest goal, they created a new way of doing businesss.

© 2008 The Age

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