Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe

Why does Procter & Gamble repeatedly call on enthusiastic amateurs to solve scientific and technical challenges? How can companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless employ just a handful of people, yet generate millions of dollars in revenue every year?

“Crowdsourcing” is how the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the responsibility of a specialized few. Jeff Howe, the author of CrowdSourcing, reveals that the crowd is more than wise–it’s talented, creative, and stunningly productive. It’s also a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of the work is all that counts. If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, you’ve got the job.

But crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed. As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are Read more

Breakthrough Business Results with MVT

The book “Breakthrough Business Results with MVT” by Charles W. Holland makes the case for multivariate testing on web pages, too. And if you’ve ever heard about Taguchi Testing, it’s a specific form of Multivariate testing — that also just happens to be a much faster method of multivariate testing.

This book is highly recommended if you’d like to geek out a bit and learn more about Taguchi and Multivariate testing. The review is a reprint from Amazon.com.

“Every executive in the world wants the same thing—improved results: more profit, less cost, better quality, and higher customer satisfaction. But what business improvement ideas will produce these results, and how can you be sure that plans that look good on paper will actually work in the real world?

Testing ideas one at a time is too slow and too expensive. Only one revolutionary method offers a powerful, fast, and inexpensive way to prove with certainty what Read more

The Wisdom of Crowds

Have you ever seen “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”

In that game show, there are three “lifelines” that contestants can use to help them arrive at the right answer. One of them is to phone a friend — someone that the contestant previously chose as an “expert.”

Another lifeline is “Ask the audience”, where everyone in the audience guesses the answer.

Have you ever wondered which option was better?

Here’s a quote from a book called “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki that answers that question:

“…The ‘experts’ did okay, offering the right answer — under pressure — almost 65 percent of the time. But they paled into comparison to the audiences. Those random crowds of people with nothing better to do on a weekday afternoon than sit in a TV studio picked the right answer 91 percent of the time.”

Why do you think that the audience is Read more