 Hello, this is Gerrit Leonhardt. Welcome to another edition of Meeting of the Minds. Today I have with me from Sydney, Australia, Ross Dawson, futurist, author, strategist and a good friend. So, Ross, you have written a book on crowdsourcing. What is it called again? Getting results from crowds. Okay. I have it in my Kindle queue and I read some of it, but I saw your slideshows on this and a lot of people talk about crowdsourcing. So, how do you find this? How do you actually define this and what could it mean on a global scale? My simple definition of crowdsourcing is tapping the minds of many. So, it's not about physical labor, it's about our minds or sometimes our money. But what crowds is about getting many, many people to be involved and engaged. So, it's not just finding one person or a couple of people. It's about how do we get value from many. And this is, I think, transforming almost every aspect of our world. It's transforming organizations. So, now because you can access crowds of insights and energy around the world, organizations now need to go outside to crowds. Those organizations that only look at their internal resources are enormously disadvantaged compared with those organizations that go outside. We are seeing that governments can look to crowdsourcing not just to be able to get a more representative democracy, but also to help them get many people to assist them in achieving their objectives of supporting a greater society, of making the society being the one which creates value. We're seeing that crowds are transforming media, where many people are creating media and helping us to filter and sort through what is the most interesting and relevant media and content. And we're having crowds being able to really shape opportunity. So, I think one of the marvelous examples I love is called VizWiz, where blind people can use their camera on their phone. They can take a photograph and then say, you know, of the things I'm looking at in my cupboard, which one is the can of baked beans. That message goes out around the world. People get that and we immediately send a message back, which gets spoken by the camera. So, we are getting many people lending their eyes to blind people. There's many ways in which we have collectively been able to provide value for organizations, for governments, to those who are disadvantaged. So, I think this is absolutely transformative. This is a new landscape. It's interesting, you know, a lot of people would... And when I speak about this with my clients, a lot of people argue that the crowd doesn't know much. You know, there is no wisdom of the crowd. And I don't know what you take us on this, but this is obviously a key question. Are they actually doing anything good? For example, you know, MP3.com back in the days of the internet, it was a musical landfill, you know, it was all garbage basically. I mean, that's what people are saying. I'm not saying it was. But so, do we have wisdom of the crowd or do we not? It depends on the situation. I think it's very important to say that crowds are not relevant for everything. And in fact, insight of individuals or sometimes small groups will be better than crowds in some situations. So, we have to be very careful. When do we use crowds? When do we not use crowds? And there's issues around intellectual property and confidentiality, around understanding enough context. So, for example, if you're trying to create a new strategy for your organization, it's not going to be very easy just to ask the world, the whole world, all right, what should our strategy be? But if you ask the people inside your organization, it's probably going to be a lot better insights from that than if you just ask the, you know, the head of strategy. Does it diminish the odd, the expert ship of the top-level people who've studied for 50 years to know this? Does it diminish them when there's somebody coming who was 16 years old, like this guy, Andrakha, who's inventing the tricorder? So, you know, the doctors are saying, now, this, I'm not happy with this because I'm the expert. Well, absolutely. I think that those who think, look at their own expertise are sometimes threatened or challenged. I mean, back to the broader point, you know, irrespective of crowds, doctors, many doctors today are unhappy that their patients have access to medical data and can search and find out more about their own disease before coming in. And this is a form of crowdsourcing as well. We have access to a lot of information. But, again, I would prefer to go to an expert doctor than I would to a crowd to get input about my disease. That's probably a good example. I'm not sure about that. I think that, of course, one of the central issues of crowdsourcing is the question of who owns what and why should I, and who's authorized and, like, you know, education moving into the cloud. So, you can study at the Cannes Academy and other people have put up the video, but you don't get a certificate. And does it matter? So, this is the question that I would have for you there. When does it matter and when does it not matter? I don't think there's a recipe there. No, I think it depends, of course, on situations. That example of education, I think, is a really good one because, first of all, there's a lot of content being created. We also need to make sure that we're accessing content while they're actually saying the right things. So, part of it is we get a crowd that gets reputation measures saying, yes, this is indeed quality education and you can trust that. Part of the next thing is if we get that education is how do we get the certification? As in to say, well, actually, you have that sufficient knowledge and what we can start to do is get crowds, this peer assessment. Peers can actually assess the people who they're studying with just as well as a professor can when you add up all of their opinions. So, we can get some probably some very accurate certification. Yes, you are at a university level or you're a Harvard university level even if you haven't necessarily gone there and a professor signed off on that and that's something which employers can look to and the way in which a crowd assessment can in fact be as equivalent to a expert official assessment. Well, isn't in the end I think that both of those ideas can miserably fail. You know, the old system, like a botanical, they had mistakes in it and Wikipedia came and wiped them out pretty much but Wikipedia, for example, my own entry was deleted on Wikipedia by somebody who hated what I said about the music business, I think. So, they told me I wasn't important, whatever that means, enough to be listed on Wikipedia, which I don't, I could care less. But, I mean, this clearly made me think about whether the crowdsourcing that happens on Wikipedia is actually good or not because if they can kick me out just because somebody doesn't like me, is that better than a botanica? There's many flaws in Wikipedia and I think that people have measured the best articles on Wikipedia compared with Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, and they're fine. If you go further and further down the long tail, it's more and more serious information. It's less and less reliable and I think we do need to understand that. But it comes back to saying crowds can be fantastic for some things but we do need to be very, you know, careful about that and understand the application. But one of the other massive applications of crowds is crowdfunding and this is the new ways in which capital can be allocated to where it can get the most benefit. And we've seen that, you know, many massive campaigns on Kickstarter and other platforms around the world and these are ways in which, you know, where money, people are voting with their wallets and being able to say, this is where I want to put money and getting fantastic things to happen which never would have happened otherwise. Yes, I mean, of course in Switzerland we live in this very interesting system where we are doing a lot with the crowd. And some, all kinds of issues, big and small. So we have a crowd, but, you know, we only have about, I think, 25% of people actually participating in these smaller elections because the crowd does not have the time to review the issue. So one of the key questions I have about crowdsourcing is this, you know, do we need a really unauthorized consumer? You know, if we have 7 billion people on the internet, will we get 7 billion of them involved in crowdfunding and contributing and, you know, or is it still going to just be that 1%? It certainly won't be everybody and will be a small proportion of crowdfunding but if you look at the size of the global capital markets you don't need much to be able to fill in some of the gaps for where things aren't happening today. And again, I think moving forward is what I describe as the crowd mechanisms. So for example, if many people have an opinion well, which opinion should you listen to more than others? These are the things which we can get evolve over time. So, you know, fun way I think is the idea of crowds and crowdsourcing is transformative but we still have a long way to go not least to be able to work out, you know, answer some of the questions you have around what works and what doesn't. So what should the company do now? Let's say in 5 years we've got 5 billion people on the internet and if you're a bank or you're an insurance company or a government, you know, how should you start looking at crowdsourcing as being part of your future? I think the first thing is to be able to say what is it that we should be doing inside our organizations? What can we look to outside? And there's 5 domains right now which I think are really important for organizations to look at. One is in terms of marketing. Very simply, in terms of how do we get great marketing content? How do we get customers engaged in what we are doing? Creating new products, for example. Another one is in terms of innovation. So throughout the innovation process to get ideas from many people very insightful people around the world about that. To be able to change business processes so the business processes can be allocated to whoever can do that most effectively around the world being able to build new business models to think around how can we build our business model so it is not just about us creating value but how the crowd participates in that business model and also for large organizations for their internal crowds getting, tapping the energy and insights and intuition of the people inside their organizations who can do more than just their job role but indeed contribute to many other things that the organization is doing. In a way so that's really sort of a summary of all points in being open essentially because crowdsourcing involves being open and taking the rest of being open. This is one of the things I think that for companies that are looking at this they have to be able to open up and take more of a risk in this process of finding these things because they want to be faster and you can't really have both you can't be closed and be fast or not take a risk and so this is sort of the natural trade-off and this is where, this of course gets difficult because when you decide to open then you also decide to take the rest. It is challenging but that's going to be the difference between the organizations succeed and those that get left behind. So one of the most visible projects is being the e-pebble watch which is a watch which is something that sits on your wrist I think we're going to have to stop calling them watches now which is linked to your mobile phone and gives you important things like social media updates and the weather and the latest information all the things and it's synchronized with your mobile phone. They didn't get any venture capital support they couldn't get a venture capitalist who would say this is a good idea we're going to invest in it. So they went to the crowd got more than ten million dollars in investment from the crowd and they've created a product which is transformative. So this concludes today's episode of Meeting of the Minds. Thanks very much to Ross Dawson for being part of this today. If you want to know more about the show you can go to meetingoftheminds.tv We're also taking questions and inputs for the next show. Just use the Twitter hashtag meetingoftheminds and we'll be responding and trying to work your comments into our next show. Thanks very much for joining us.