Collective Intelligence

I was at the CEOTech conference this week at Stanford put on by Chief Executive. Good agenda, good speakers - David Kim is an interesting guy for sure.

One of the sessions was about "Cloud Computing + Crowd Sourcing + Collective Intelligence = Higher Success", and was moderated by successful angel investor M.R. Rangaswami. OK, the cloud computing piece was fairly easy to discuss (Amit Singh from Google made the best analogy when he compared cloud computing to electricity - now we only think about the electric outlet not the task of generating power in our business).

However, the panel really fell apart in my view when it came to explaining and differentiating crowd-sourcing and collective intelligence. I'm sure the crowd was collectively confused by the end. I'm not blaming the panel but they really described crowd-sourcing as a low-cost, high reach RFP system - find a designer on Elance or a developer on Odesk type of thing. Then they moved on to "collective intelligence" and really described it - to all intents and purposes - as 'Ask the Audience' on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Collective intelligence is the aggregated or average views or actions taken from a large number of people (actively or passively) for the purposes of enabling decisions and insight into a topic or fulfilling a task. Crowd-sourcing is a tool you can use to do this. Survey and research companies have been doing this for years, the point now is that tools and availability means we can all do it and it has a potentially big impact on our business.