BackCan you crowdsource a big idea?
How 'the crowd' can contribute to academic work, how together we can deepen our understanding of complex problems, and contribute to solving those problems
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Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, famously said, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else." This insight is almost a tagline for the rise of online distributed innovation, commonly referred to as “crowd sourcing." A number of scholars at Harvard Business School (HBS) have gotten in on the act, studying how crowds solve problems. Last year, HBS’s dean, Nitin Nohria challenged us to apply what we have learned to generating relevant, rigorous knowledge.
Working with Professor Clayton Christensen on the research that became “The Capitalist’s Dilemma," (The Capitalist’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen and Derek van Bever, Harvard Business Review, June 2014), we thought, how might we disrupt our own knowledge generation process? While HBS certainly has brilliant professors who are creating new knowledge, the mathematical truth is that there are more smart people outside of HBS than within it. We realized that we had a strong connection to an enormous untapped asset—the HBS alumni—and decided to formulate a “beta" challenge to test with the alumni of Clay’s course. We used the OI Engine software, dreamt up by Tom Hulme while he was studying at HBS and currently used for OpenIDEO, a diverse community that solves challenges with a social-impact focus. In one sense, this project was cutting edge, but it builds on really promising methods developed by organizations like the open source software community, the Wikipedia collective, TopCoder, OpenIDEO, General Electric, Siemens and NASA. Here are some lessons we learned:
Consider what your question assumes. We invested considerable time in framing the challenge question, how do we innovate for long term growth and job creation? We could have opted for a simpler or broader question, but we hoped the tough challenge would pique the intellectual interest of community members. While this resulted in high quality contributions, it also led to at least some selection bias. In this situation, we consciously accepted this trade off for reasons both substantive, like our desire to build on an existing knowledge base, and contextual, such as managing HBS’s inaugural foray into working collaboratively with the crowd.
Ask the right parts of your community. We consciously decided that virtually all of the invited community would be alumni of Clay’s course at HBS, both because they shared a common intellectual framework and because they would be more likely to answer a call to action from Clay. While our ultimate goal is to tap a broader group, research suggests that starting with a small, connected community is the best way to seed a thriving community.
Set norms for contributions early. We quickly observed a culture of composed contribution. People did not seem comfortable thinking aloud (as it were) in front of the community. This response was in marked contrast with other open source situations. The general reluctance to contribute imperfectly finished thoughts created a significant barrier to entry; we suspect that it discouraged creative but less developed ideas that could have pushed thinking, been more open to refinement, and served to build ties among participants.
Get people up to speed. Our collective thinking evolved over time; while many early ideas shaped the article directly, other ideas sparked others’ thinking. Given our time-poor community, this made urgent the challenge of bringing community members up to speed. Our solution was to offer accessible building blocks of the conversation. We featured contributions that we thought would give the users a soft re-entry into the challenge and sent summary newsletters to the community outlining some key activities on the platform.
Keep them coming back. Our colleagues in the HBS Digital Initiative have studied the construction of online communities; they often begin as small, passionate, and densely populated, then later become a collection of interlinked communities. We hope to pull a much larger group in to our discussions in the future and explore how to bring the crowd into all aspects of our mission.
In a more general sense, we intend to continue exploring how “the crowd" can contribute to academic work, how together we can deepen our understanding of complex, hard-to-solve problems, and how we can contribute to solving those problems.
Tom Hulme is design director at IDEO in London and managing director of OpenIDEO and OIEngine. Matt R. Tucker is the platform and engagement manager for the Digital Initiative at HBS. Colin Maclay directs the digital initiative at HBS. Karim R. Lakhani is an associate professor of business administration at HBS.
©2015 Harvard Business Review. All rights reserved.
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