The Myth about the Myth of Crowdsourcing

Is Jigsaw the only true example of crowdsourcing? Dan Woods, writing in Forbes, thinks so.

Woods’ contention is that all innovation comes from individual virtuosos. While Threadless may tap into a crowd, each new idea comes from an individual. Viewed this way, Jigsaw is one of a very few companies where the crowd is an essential element of the creative process. However, for Jigsaw the crowd provides no innovation, so it supports the view that crowds cannot innovate. If you buy into this view, crowdsourcing, as commonly used, refers to nothing more than a broad search for individual innovators. Crowdsourcing is a myth.

This is a very simplistic view and one that from a leader’s standpoint is highly misleading. There are many kinds of innovation, and some are served very well by crowds. As a leader, it’s about not about who creates the innovation. Unless you are the inventor, who really cares? Leaders must focus on how to create the conditions by which innovation happens in their organization. Managing for the big innovation doesn’t always produce the best returns. An organization that fosters small, continuous innovations often eventually generates a huge advantage versus competitors that sit around waiting for a breakthrough that creates disruptive change.

Crowdsourcing drives continuous innovation

Broad and successful collaboration is one of the most proven ways to drive continuous improvement. How else do you improve continuously? If you depend just on your employees and neglect the larger “crowd” of customers, partners, and prospects, you will miss a huge number of potential innovations. From a leader’s perspective, an environment where many people (a “crowd”) are empowered to each suggest small improvements (aka innovations) looks like a textbook application of crowdsourcing—even if Dan Woods disagrees. These principles are used successfully by Threadless and other companies to create (really co-create) a continuous stream of new products. Most leaders I know consider product development a form of innovation and don’t quibble over whether it came from a crowd or any individual within a crowd.

If you want to split hairs, yes, each of the individual innovation at Threadless is suggested by an individual, but that’s not the point. As a leader, you can’t possibly know who the innovators are going to be, so you have to empower the crowd if you want to harvest the innovations. Failing to distinguish the role of the crowd is like failing to distinguish a football team or army from the collection of individuals that comprise it.

Disruptive change is different

While crowds are great at improving a given product or process, betting on crowds to hand you the next great disruptive innovation won’t get you remembered next to Steve Jobs in the Pantheon of great innovators. In the famous words of Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’.” Think about it: if large numbers of people could foresee the impact of a disruptive change, it wouldn’t be very disruptive.

A business like Threadless uses crowds to create lots of product variation and keep it from falling afoul of the winds of fashion. However, I doubt Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart would look to crowdsourcing for a disruptive new business concept or idea. In our ever faster moving world, change and innovation are the lifeblood of competitiveness. Crowdsourcing is another tool for leaders to draw upon in managing for change.

Categories: Innovation

Tags: crowdsourcing , jigsaw , La Fetra , threadless

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