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This piece has originally been posted on Medium.

The following are twelve thoughts about crowdsourcing taken from my recently published book “We the People of the Crowd…” and summarizing my 20+ years of experience in running internal and external crowdsourcing campaigns.

1. In recent years, crowdsourcing has become a popular topic in business publications and social media. Yet its acceptance as a practical problem-solving tool has been slow. Why? First, there is a widespread, often completely paralyzing, uncertainty over which problem crowdsourcing can (or can’t) solve. Second, the expansive use of the term “crowdsourcing” has blurred its borders with other problem-solving tools. As a result, crowdsourcing is often used incorrectly, and when the outcome disappoints, it is crowdsourcing itself that gets the blame for being ineffective.
2. A fundamental benefit of using crowdsourcing is that by posting your problem online, you become agnostic to the sources of potential solutions. They may come from anywhere and anyone, and you don’t have to do anything to “target” your search — given, of course, that your crowd is sufficiently large and diversified. In other words, when you crowdsource, you don’t have to spend time and resources on finding solvers to your problem; you only need to analyze the solutions that these self-selected solvers are sending your way. Let me repeat it again: the beauty of crowdsourcing is that you don’t need to look for solutions to your problem. You post your problem online, and then the right solution will come to you.
3. When working with subject-matter experts, be aware of the issue of diversity of responses. If you’re approaching a person who is an expert in Method A, don’t expect this person to tell you that using Method B might be a better solution. And if you’re approaching an expert in Method B, don’t expect them to tell you that this method won’t work; a solution provided by this expert will inevitably include at least some of Method B. Besides, there is always a chance that Methods C, D, or E exist, but because you never heard of them, you don’t know appropriate experts. Saying it differently, when asking for an expert opinion, you automatically narrow the scope of potential solutions to what you already know. Crowdsourcing is different. Unless you specifically say that you’re interested only in Methods A or B, incoming solutions will be focused on solving your problem, not the way of solving it. That’s why a properly designed crowdsourcing campaign often results in highly original, even completely unexpected, solutions forcing your clients to exclaim in awe, “Wow, we never thought about that!”
4. Yet another reason for the slow adoption of crowdsourcing is the lack of trust in the intellectual power of a crowd. Sure, it’s OK to apply the proverbial “wisdom of crowds” to accomplish a simple task, such as creating a corporate logo or choosing the name for a city landmark. However, when it comes to answering questions that require specialized knowledge, corporations prefer to turn to experts. A fundamental flaw of the notion that people participating in crowdsourcing campaigns are just a bunch of “amateurs” is that real-life crowds are composed of experts. True, they might not be experts working in your field or in your industry; but they’re experts in something, nonetheless. Moreover, research shows that someone’s likelihood of solving a specific problem increases with the distance between this person’s own field of technical expertise and the problem’s domain. Crowdsourcing folklore is full of stories featuring a patent attorney cracking chemical synthesis problems in his spare time, or a protein crystallographer who solved a toxicology mystery that puzzled a bunch of seasoned toxicologists.
5. When pointing to the virtues of crowdsourcing, I’m not trying to pit experts against “crowds.” Crowdsourcing is impossible without experts. Only experts can identify and properly formulate problems that organizations are facing. Only experts can understand and evaluate external proposals to select those that make sense. Only experts can combine external information with the knowledge available in-house. It’s only at this midpoint of the problem-solving process — at the stage of generating solutions to the problem — that crowds are usually superior to experts. We, therefore, should consider experts and crowds as complementary tools in every innovation management toolbox. There is no sense to discuss which tool is better; each should be used at its proper place and time.
6. Crowdsourcing is first and foremost a question, a question that you ask a crowd of contributors. It doesn’t matter what this question is about, if it’s well thought out, properly defined, and clearly articulated. Yes, it can be a question about a solution to a problem. And yes, it can be a question about the problem itself. So, when asked what one needs to run a successful crowdsourcing campaign I always answer: only two things. A question and a crowd.
7. I’m not a big fan of using military terminology for non-military topics. Yet, it’s tempting to compare a crowdsourcing campaign to a military operation. To begin with, you need a large and competent crowd (your “army”) to solve a problem. But even more importantly, you must define this problem (your “enemy”) so that the crowd can attack it in the most efficient way. Failing to do so will make your enemy elusive and your campaign unfocused and, inevitably, unsuccessful. I call it the “80:20 rule”: in my experience, about 80% of unsuccessful crowdsourcing campaigns failed because the problem presented to the crowd was not properly defined; only 20% failed because of a poor match between the problem and the crowd’s skillset.
8. Crowdsourcing is often confused with brainstorming but there is a principal difference between the two. When you brainstorm, you put a question to a few people and let them come up with answers. As the brainstorming session progresses, people propose their own ideas, capitalize on the ideas of others, or perhaps redefine the question itself. Many people believe that if you replace this group of four to seven — reportedly the optimal number of people for brainstorming — with a crowd of dozens or even hundreds and move this discussion online, you’ll get crowdsourcing. But this is not true. Crowdsourcing is different from brainstorming in one crucial aspect: it requires the independence of opinions. In contrast to brainstorming, during a crowdsourcing campaign, you must make sure that the members of your crowd, whether individuals or small teams, provide their input independently of the opinions of others. It’s this aspect of crowdsourcing that allows avoiding groupthink and other cognitive biases and leads to the delivery of highly diversified, original, and often completely unexpected solutions to the problem — as opposed to brainstorming, which almost always ends up with the group reaching a consensus.
9. Online communities give us many diverse options to interact with other people. Every option is a tool of sorts, and as any tool, it should be used with a full understanding of what it can or can’t do. Among other tools, crowdsourcing stands out by being, first and foremost, a question that you ask a crowd. The quality of the question is the most crucial factor in determining the quality of the answer. You ask the crowd a smart question — you have the chance to get a smart answer. You ask the crowd a stupid question — the answer will almost certainly be stupid. It’s this simple.
10. It’s difficult to precisely define how many people one should bring together to have a “crowd.” However, from the practical point of view, this number isn’t vitally important. I used to work with relatively small crowds, no more than just a few dozen people, that nevertheless successfully solved difficult problems. The opposite is also true: a crowd composed of more than a hundred thousand may well fail to deliver a good solution. Much more important than the crowd size is its diversity. If I had to choose between a crowd composed of ten thousand military officers — or ten thousand lawyers, or ten thousand farmers — and a crowd of only one thousand that included military officers AND lawyers AND farmers, I would choose the latter. And if offered the opportunity to work with a crowd of a million, I would not even bother to ask about the crowd’s composition. I know that by virtue of its sheer size, such a crowd will include people of different professional, educational, cultural, and cognitive backgrounds — in other words, everyone to make up an “ideal” crowd.
11. Unfortunately, many organizations begin launching external crowdsourcing campaigns before engaging internal crowds. The results are often disappointing: lacking internal support, external ideas and solutions are often met with stiff resistance from inside the company. Their implementation gets stalled, then tacitly boycotted, and eventually rejected. To add insult to injury, such outcomes give additional ammunition to naysayers, who jump at the opportunity to claim that “crowdsourcing doesn’t work for us.” This is not to say, of course, that organizations should postpone experimenting with external crowdsourcing until they master the art and science of internal (which may take years). My point is that the full potential of external crowdsourcing for any organization will only be realized by the concerted effort of connected employees capable of identifying and defining their own needs. Or, to say it differently, the power of crowdsourcing comes from the strength within.
12. A few years ago, a group of New York City-based entrepreneurs proposed an interesting version of crowdfunding, crowdraising, an approach that allows crowds to pledge time instead of money to support projects and causes they care about. Any organization with a worthy goal would be capable of using crowdraising to hire a crowd to perform business-related activities. These activities could be as simple as taking part in a survey, conducting beta testing, or giving feedback. But they could also involve more complex tasks, such as coding, design work, or strategic advice. After completing their work on the project, the members of the crowd would be expected to be rewarded: from a free product sample for simpler tasks to cash or equity for more complex activities. As far as I know, this approach hasn’t yet been realized in practice. However, I consider crowdraising a promising idea with the potential to create a new paradigm of finding and hiring employees in the gig economy. Taken together with new ways of problem-solving (provided by crowdsourcing) and raising money (provided by crowdfunding), all three approaches may profoundly shape the future of work. And there is something else I strongly believe in: new ways of capitalizing on the wisdom of crowds will emerge.