The Power of the Crowd

The book emphasizes the transformative potential of leveraging the crowd for innovation and problem-solving. Traditional organizations often rely on a centralized core of experts, but the crowd—diverse, large, and often messy—can outperform these experts by bringing in fresh perspectives and a wide range of skills. For instance, the success of platforms like Wikipedia and Linux demonstrates how open, noncredentialist, and self-organizing systems can produce high-quality outcomes. The authors highlight a study where a crowd-sourced competition on Topcoder significantly outperformed established algorithms in annotating gene sequences.