Synthetron CEO Joanne Celens presented at the global Crowd Source Weekly conference in Singapore and brings back two important insights on organisational evolution and global speed.
The conference which focused on 3 themes: crowdsourcing for corporations, crowdsourcing to leverage the social economy and crowdfunding.
“An important new insight for me is picture of evolution of organisation formats by Reinaldo Pamponet shown here” she explains. “From centralised,then decentralised to a networked designed organisation is what fuels the crowd economy. These network organisations are more resilient, more adaptable and faster because of the distributed information and decision capacity of the network. The crowd evolves from spectators to connected, and finally to protagonists. The new companies like Airb’n’b uber etc access resources through this model. Exponential growth and crowd distributed activities become possible but applying it in corporate environment is a real challenge.”
The second major insight is the scale, stories and speed by which digitalisation allows crowdsourced solutions to pop up all over the world. California is no longer the epicentre – great innovative stuff is happening simultaneously in many cultures – in fact some less developed markets are better at leapfrog solutions because they have less to protect. This trend brings energy, buzz, highly diverse movements, crazy and wonderful ideas as illustrated by these highlights:
- MOOC’s online university courses have 12 million students per annum (compared to around 20k at say Harvard or Cambridge)
- Rappler, a Philippine online newspaper/media developed a way to get complete info in the case of natural disasters like hurricanes by combining different layers of maps with data from twitter, army drones, instagram, google maps and digital humanitarians (people anywhere in the world who want to help and classify data by eg infrastructure problems, health, food or criminal problems. Artificial Intelligence learns from their tagged data and then seamlessly updates the map based on pictures assembled real time.
- Civico crowdsourced a whole city map of Lima with the help of youngsters in a couple of months.
- Brands use crowdsourcing mostly in marketing area for ideas and videos
Lastly Joanne shared the example of bitcoin: “I finally understand what is the real value of bitcoin… not so much the value or coin, but rather the blockchain technology that works in a peer to peer network like the third picture above. It is a kind of fraud proof general ledger 3.0 – maybe as revolutionary as the invention of double entry bookkeeping.
