Tapping into collective intelligence - the wisdom of crowds

Let me share with you some creative examples. Fashion designer Coach wanted to reach a new and younger audience. They used an online contest that allowed participants to choose and create tote styles, graphics and colours. Customers were encouraged to rate and comment on the designs. In less than six weeks, the company received 3,200 entries. Designs from the contest that were placed into production resulted in increased sales and enhanced customer satisfaction.

For those who are Oscar Award fans, this year you might enjoy “The People’s Oscar” on Twitter. The online sentiment analysis tool called the Senti-meter – you may know it as The Oscar Senti-mater – developed by the Los Angeles Times, IBM and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, was used to analyse opinions about the 2012 Academy Awards race shared in millions of posts on Twitter. Focused on the best actor, actress and picture categories, the Senti-meter combed through tweets daily to gauge positive, negative and neutral opinions shared in the messages to pick “The People’s Oscar”.

Behind these examples, there is a power that none of us can afford to ignore. It’s the power of people’s voice, or as I call it, the “wisdom of crowds”. A recent IBM study found that creative managers recognise how uniquely suited the crowd is to making sense of a world that’s more complex, interconnected and interdependent. 

Such leaders invite diverse groups of people inside and outside their organisations to help solve nagging problems and come up with disruptive new ideas. They foster collaboration among groups of workers to unearth hidden expertise and spread out across borders, time zones and office complexes. They pinpoint and rally customers to help design and market products – creating ready-made clients in the process. 

After all, cooperation already plays a huge part in everything from how markets and cities work, to how people interact. What’s different now are the tools – social media, mobile devices and the Internet. These technologies provide powerful ways to harness this collaborative spirit and pinpoint individual expertise, often in surprising ways. 

Tapping the collective intelligence of people inside and outside of a business can propel organisations forward in three key ways. Forward-looking companies are already mapping out the best practices for extracting the wisdom of the virtual commons. 

 

Discover, share new ideas 

Use contests, communities of interest and online collaborative design spaces to identify disruptive ideas, improve everyday ways of doing business and strengthen ties with customers. 

These fresh approaches trump traditional ones, such as focus groups or surveys, for a few simple reasons: They reach a much broader group of people, and they are based on sharing and direct involvement. This uncovers insights that different groups in an organisation may never have considered. 

When Maxis Communication, Malaysia’s leading mobile service provider, sent its senior team to the US to come up with ideas for stepping up its game, the team used Twitter and Foursquare on their iPhones to share their experiences with 8,300 colleagues in Malaysia and India and get feedback on what they were hearing in meetings. The interaction sparked ideas for reinvigorating the corporate culture.

 

Tap into a wider range of skills and experiences

Collective intelligence is an entirely new way for businesses to identify and call on the talents of a distributed workforce. Different pieces of a project can be broken up and parcelled out in parallel to individuals with the best skills – whether they’re in the office next door, across the world, or don’t work for the company at all. Or organisations can set up online games that let individuals, either alone or together, come up with solutions to today’s complex problems, just as fashion designer Coach did with their online contest.

 

Improve forecasting skills 

The Oscar Senti-meter is one good example of this approach. The power of the crowd is also being used to predict events. Pulling together different perspectives and the expertise of employees, partners and customers can provide unexpected insights into the future, helping businesses make more informed decisions. Prediction markets, which are used for forecasting everything from national elections to sales of a new product, are proving particularly powerful. Rather than relying on one individual to make a forecast, these markets rely on the collective predictions of a group of participants.

Of course, crowds can run off course. That concern explains why today’s leaders need to be smart about how they deploy collective intelligence projects – not why they shouldn’t pursue them. The crowd is showing that it can solve many problems more intelligently than even the smartest individuals. Smart leaders are showing that they know a good opportunity to get ahead when they see it.

 

Parnsiree Amatayakul is managing director of IBM Thailand. Her article is published every third Friday of the month.