Wisdom of the Crowd

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of the crowds: by asking the crowd for ideas and preferences, start-ups could develop the concept of their unique value proposition; a large pool of amateurs and professionals available could also help them developing their brands and conducting social media marketing – which could be as effective and much less expensive than ad agencies; and last but not least, business angels from the crowds could help them raising funds for their ideas and projects (crowdfunding) (Bernhut, 2013).

3. Examples

The idea of Wisdom of the crowd in the era of Web 2.0 is that “applications, information, and services can be improved by group participation, rather than a singularly individual perspective or experience” (Regli, 2008). In electronic business, wisdom of the crowd has been widely leveraged in rating business such as Yelp and TripAdvisor. Similarly, Airbnb and Amazon also rely on user generated contents to create more value to their business. Collaborative learning projects such as Udemy, edX take wisdom from the crowd, validate it and provide it to everyone in one easy-to-use place (Graham, 2013). It is also worth mentioning the concept of MOOC i.e. massive open online courses such as Coursera and Udacity, where everyone can connect, collaborate with each other and benefit from crowdsourced interactions, peer reviews and group discussions (Graham, 2013). Duolingo, an app developed for learning foreign languages, aims to get crowds to do what computers do inadequately—translate text. Language learners will be asked to translate sentences from the foreign language they are learning to their own. They will be provided with one-to-one dictionary translations of individual words, and they should use their experience to see what makes sense in context. If one million people participated, it is predicted that they could translate every English-language page of Wikipedia into Spanish in just 80 hours (Savage, 2012). Last but not least, regarding crowdsourcing, many well-known companies such as BMW, Fiat, Lego, Frito Lay, etc. have turned to wisdom of the consumer crowd by interacting with them on social media and use this as a source for product innovation, such as rewarded competition for designing logos and packaging, sharing videos, etc. (Howe, 2008).

References

Bernhut, S. (2013). The "right" crowd is the wise crowd: interview with Piaerkinheimo. Ivey Business Journal Online,1. 

Duboff, R. S. (2007, 09). The wisdom of (expert) crowds. Harvard Business Review,85, 28.

Escoffier, N., & McKelvey, B. (2015). The wisdom of crowds in the movie industry: Towards new solutions to reduce uncertainties. International Journal of Arts Management, 17(2), 52-63,85-86.

Graham, K. (2013). The wisdom of the crowd. Training Journal, 28-32.

Guessing Game: A new type of prediction market (2016). The Economist, Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/news/business-and-finance/21688751-almanis-aims-harness-wisdom-crowds-without-groupthink-new-type

Howe, J. (2006). The rise of crowdsourcing. Wired magazine, 14(6), 1-4.

Howe, J. (2008) Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Crown Publishing Group, New York.

Mavrodiev, P., Tessone, C. J., & Schweitzer, F. (2012). Effects of social influence on the wisdom of crowds. arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.3463.

Regli, T. (2008). Crowd “wisdom”? AIIM E - Doc Magazine, 22(4), 19.

Savage, N. (2012). Gaining wisdom from crowds. Association for Computing Machinery -Communications of the ACM, 55(3), 13.

Surowiecki, J. (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds – Why the many are smarter than the few. First Anchor Books Edition, New York.