Connectivism

 Centuries ago, it is possible for a single

brilliant individual – an Aristotle or
Leonardo – to surpass all others across
many areas of knowledge
 But thanks to connectivity, collectively we
now know far more than even the most
brilliant individual. Because….
 Knowledge is

distributed/decentralized
 Knowledge is interconnected

 Knowledge is personal

 Learning is a process of connecting

specialized nodes or information

sources

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 Why it works**

• Harness latent micro expertise

• Collaboration routinely locates people with just the
right micro expertise for the occasion
• The idea often spark ideas from others. The “Aha”
moment.
• As creative collaboration is scaled up, the
collaboration achieves a kind of “designed
serendipity”*

* “chance that one idea will stimulate another new idea” By Jon Udell
**“ Reinventing Discovery” by Michael Nielsen 2012 2
 Crowdsourcing:
Ideagoras/Open Innovation
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 Crowdsourcing Origin

 The Crowdsourcing philosophy was first introduced at the

turn of the 21st century with James Surowiecki's book “The
Wisdom of Crowds”
 The term 'Crowdsourcing' was used for the first time in
2006 by Jeff Howe, a portmanteau of the words 'crowd' and
'sourcing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0-UtNg3ots)
 A more detailed definition was introduced on Wikipedia by
Henk van Ess in September 2010 "Crowdsourcing is
channeling the experts desire to solve a problem and then
freely sharing the answer with everyone”

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 Premise behind Crowdsourcing

“No matter who you are, most of the smartest

people work for someone else” Bill Joy, Sun
Microsystems cofounder

this “law” emphasizes the essential knowledge problem that faces

many enterprises today, that is, that in any given sphere of activity most
of the pertinent knowledge will reside outside the boundaries of any
one organization, and the central challenge for those charged with the
innovation mission is to find ways to access that knowledge

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 Internet is the infrastructure of the crowd

 It connects lots of different types of people

 Physically the Net connect all nodes equally, but
socially it consists of billions of sub-network
 Net is cumulative (people create content, other create
links to curate the content)
 It scales indefinitely
 Captcha: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4

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 R&D vs. Outsourcing vs. Crowd sourcing
In House R&D Crowdsourcing
 closed
 (usually) open but company
 internal employees
keeps Intellectual Property
develop, select and
commercialize the  no employees
technologies  no notion of a “team”
 high costs  management is crucial
Outsourcing  negligible costs
• (usually) closed
• external employees
• teams can change
• on demand
• more flexible management
• less higher costs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQe8dWTbE2U&feature=related
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 The earliest crowd sourcing project

In 1714, British Parliament established a prize of £20,000 (US$12M

today) to anyone who could invent a way determine the longitude
on a sailing vessel

Longitude : the true story of a lone genius

who solved the greatest scientific problem
of his time / Dava Sobel
QB225 .S64 1995

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 Harrison’s timepieces

H1

H3 H4
National Maritime Museum Romney Road,
Greenwich
9
H2
A typology of problem solving on the Internet

Single solution Open-ended

answers.yahoo.com
Individual Naver.com (South Korea) Case Lego
NYT Diagnosis
TED’s translation
Collective Open Source
project

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 Diagnosis: Unsolved Cases (NYT)

https://www.nytimes.com/series/diagnosis-unsolved-cases 11
 The Lego Prosumer Community

 Lego itself has become a flagship for how to get customers deeply
involved in co-creating and co-innovating products.
 With Lego Mindstorms, for example, users build real robots out of
programmable bricks that can be turned into two-legged walking
machines, or into just about anything a teenage mind can envision.
 Today Lego uses mindstorms.lego.com to encourage tinkering with its
software. The company benefits hugely from the work of this volunteer
business web. Each time a customer posts a new application for
Mindstorms, the toy becomes more valuable.
 The Mindstorms experience has proven to be so successful that Lego has
transferred its customer-centric development practices to its more
conventional Lego brick toys with a service that lets customers design
their own custom Lego sets.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXiql8Fm64A
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 The results of LEGO crowdsourcing*

*ITSM Sourcing specialization 2011-2012

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Crowdsource: TED Translation Project

 https://www.ted.com/participate/translate

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Why do people do it?
 Earn Money (real or virtual)
 Have fun (or pass the time)
 Socialize with others
 Obtain recognition or prestige (leaderboards, badges)
 Do Good (altruism)
 Learn something new
 Obtain something else
 Create self-serving resource

Multiple incentives can often operate in parallel

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 Crowdsourcing Landscape*

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*from crowdsourcingresults.com
Questions:

 answers.yahoo.com
 Naver.com (South Korea)

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Innovation Prize: Goldcorp*

 $575,000 prize money

 Within 1 month:
 More than 1000 virtual prospectors from 50 countries
 Result: 110 new targets, 50% previously unidentified
 80% yielded gold
 Company’s value goes from $100 million to $9 billion

 #disruptmining 2018 (https://disruptmining.com/)

Video: The Goldcorp Challenge - Rob McEwen (2017)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbifoFEswQ0

*https://www.keithrozario.com/2012/07/opensource-gold-the-greatest-crowdsourcing-story-ever-told.html18
 Innovation Prize: Netflix’s Million Dollar
Challenge

NYT: A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others

Video- From the Labs: Winning the Netflix Prize

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImpV70uLxyw
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 Crowdsourced Aggregator: Citizen
Journalism
 The collection, dissemination, and analysis of news and
information by the general public, especially by means of the
Internet (Wikipedia)
 Malaysia (http://cj.my/)
 Hong Kong (https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/01/04/hong-kongs-
inmedia-train-citizen-journalists-launch-community-level-news-
publications/)

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 Competition Platforms: Threadless

http://www.threadless.com/product/383/The_Communist_Party#zoom

https://www.racked.com/2017/11/6/16551468/threadless-t-shirts-ecommerce 21
Web 2.0 Characteristics: Community

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 Web 2.0 Characteristics: Co-creator

*NPD: New Product Development

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Web 2.0 Characteristic: Viral Marketing

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Other crowdsource competition
platforms

 American Idol & all its imitators

 Brandbowl (by Twitter)

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 Distributed Innovation: InnoCentive

• Type of business: E-Business

Online community of 160,000+ global researchers in more than 175
 Zacary Brown won US$20,000
countries
for design of a solar-powered
• Founded in: 2001 / Owned by: Alpheus Bingham wireless router
• Concept:
• Innocentive offers expertise knowledge and creativity from talented  Ed Melcarke won US$25,000
outsources candidates to companies that need to solve Research &
Development problems in Engineering, Math, Physical Science, figuring a novel way of getting
Computer Science, Business, Chemistry and Life Sciences
fluoride into toothpaste tubes
• Product:
Online posting problems offers that need research, development, and
innovation assistance

• Target:
Seekers (companies who post challenges): Corporate and nonprofit
clients
Solvers (people who solve challenges): Researchers, scientists, 26
engineers, and mathematicians from around the world
Innocentive: The Long Tail of
Innovation

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 Distributed Innovation: P&G’s Pringles
Print

 Technology brief that defined the

problems needed to solve, circulated it
throughout global networks of individuals
and institutions to discover if anyone in
the world had a ready made solution.
 A small bakery in Bologna, Italy, run by a
university professor who also
manufactured baking equipment.
 He had invented an ink-jet method for
printing edible images on cakes and
cookies that we rapidly adapted to solve
the problem.
 This innovation has helped the North
America Pringles business achieve double-
digit growth over the past two years

Huston, “Connect and Develop”, Harvard Business Review,

March 2006

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 Distributed Innovation: Other
examples
 yet2.com
 P&G and other Fortune 500 companies invested
 Online marketplace for IP* exchange
 brokers technology transfer both into and out of
companies, universities, and government labs
 Shanghai Silicon IP Exchange
 Founded by Shanghai city government and
Minister of Industry & Information, PRC

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*IP: Intellectual Property
 Content Rating

 Create new content by making users organize

existing content
 inbound links + peer voting = organization of
information
 Digg, Reddit

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 Prediction Markets
 Predict trends by inviting users to submit and vote on
events
 Mediapredict.com (users bet on media trends, such a TV
viewership, books that are likely to sell well)
 Hollywood Exchange (www.hsx.com)
 Marketocracy (This community of 70,000 online stock
traders tracks the decisions of its top 100 portfolios to set
the investment strategy for its mutual fund)

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 Service Marketplaces: Elance,
TaskRabbit, clickworker
 It is a web-based platform for online,
contingent work
 It allows businesses to post jobs, search for
freelance professionals, and solicit proposals

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 Content Market

 Generate new content by soliciting the masses

 Language translation
(http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_se
en.html)

 iStockphoto (stock content for publishing or photography)

 Doritos Crash the Super Bowl contest
 Story (http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/doritos-super-bowl-zack-snyder-
1201588852/)
 Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NuuL1FIh1I)
 Live music
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxMTS-r5cc0

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 Crowdfunding

 Asking crowd to donate a defined amount of

money for a specific cause, project or other
uses within a predetermined time frame. If
your goal is not met, all donation are
refunded
 Kickstarter & Kiva (Microloan)

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 Successful Kickstarter Campaigns

https://www.statista.com/chart/1929/the-most-successful-kickstarter-campaigns/
 ArtistShare
• ArtistShare is a platform that
connects creative artists with
http://www.artistshare.com/v4/
fans in order to share the
creative process and fund the
creation of new artistic works.
• ArtistShare created the
Internet's first fan
funding platform (referred to
today as "crowdfunding")
launching its initial project in
October, 2003.
• The business model benefits
both the artist and the fans by
financing new and original
artistic projects while building a
strong and loyal fan base
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArtistShare
https://musicbee.cc/
Fan Fiction

 Fanfiction.net

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