Creative Intrusion: Sum of parts greater than the Whole

Readings:

Crowdsourcing: Dawn of Human networks

How to build your start-up without learning code?

Information Liquidity

Why the groundswell- and why now?

Making the transition to the social web

Star Search

Days of developing breakthrough technologies in the isolation of a laboratory are long gone. Today, people come together through the social web to provide their inputs whether you like it or not! I call it creative intrusion- giving individuals and firms the opportunity to leverage the collective intellect of people all over the world. The GNU and “Beerwares” are typical examples of this collaborative effort. This ability to harvest the opinions and inputs of people presents firms a valuable opportunity to - 1) collaborate on product development 2) have a real-world control groups to market test 3) determine segments of the market that need to be convinced  4) reduce product life cycle times and many more. The social web has allowed people to have an opinion and express it and be heard.

The groundswell in people participation is direct fallout from “Ubiquitous Connectivity” and “Information Liquidity”. Social web has given people a channel to publish their opinions, likes/ dislikes about any and every topic – products, services, social issues, environmental issues, fitness and many more. In addition, these opinions are finding an audience. These opinions are triggering specific reactions from the people. None of us buy a product, book a hotel, eat at a restaurant or visit a place without first learning about how other people feel about it. The web populace has been very smart at discerning genuine opinions from propaganda or advertisements. Firms are now starting to see the need for being active listeners and participants in these fora. Tools like Salesforce.com’s Marketing cloud provide a platform for monitoring their digital brands and creating digital marketing campaigns.

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/how-ge-plans-to-act-like-a-startup-and-crowdsource-great-ideas/ shows how GE “accessed the global brain” to solve a complex aerospace problem. The “Not Invented Here” attitude of large firms is gradually giving way to collaborative development. However, there are many instances where marketing on the social media or unintended missteps led to disastrous outcomes (https://econsultancy.com/blog/7913-14-epic-social-media-fails )

But has crowd sourcing/ crowd funding helped propagate start-ups with little or no thought process? I see very little relation between writing code and a start-up. I see entrepreneurship being more than having a gee-wiz code and snazzy mock-ups. Creating and delivering value still needs to be front and center. The dot-com era is littered with numerous examples of start-up that failed due to e-commerce hype. I feel crowd sourcing and crowd funding and the social web in general fueling a similar hype.