Wikipedia is probably the most famous example of collective innovation. In Wikipedia, thousands of contributors from across the world have collectively created the world’s largest encyclopedia, with articles of remarkably high quality. Wikipedia has been developed with almost no centralised control. Anyone who wants to, can change almost anything. Decisions about what changes to keep are made by a loose consensus of unpaid volunteers.

In Threadless, anyone who wants to can design a T-shirt, submit that design to a weekly contest where all designs are rated by the community. From the entries receiving the highest ratings, the company selects winning designs, puts them into production and gives prizes and royalties to the winning designers. In this way, the company harnesses the collective intelligence of a community of over 500,000 people to design and select T-shirts.

These examples of web-enabled collective intelligence are inspiring and look like management wish fulfillment. A committed intelligent collective is all it takes for a company to define market desires, create exactly what is needed to satisfy them and do it all at minimal cost.

The 1492.// solutions enable organisations to use collective intelligence in its most powerful way to seek innovations in this age of crowd wisdom and wikinomics.

Contact us to learn more about 1492 // collective intelligent solutions.

Harvard Business Manager