Lots of great questions and insightful answers on this blog ! Just so the community understands where my comments come from, I am an innovation professional who recently moved from Finland to France and back. Not that my personal life is interesting, but it gave me some fresh insight on the many different successful paths to innovation, and also how it is sometimes so dificult to let go of the paradigms of one’s environment.

The latter point is, I now think, the key one: Crowdsourcing, as in putting in place mechanisms to throw questions to and get answers from many unknown people, works if it is in line with the values and ways of working of the organisation which tries to use it. If the leadership is question-based and (reasonably) risk-happy, and the barriers for innovation between, say, marketing and R&D are low in your company, then there’s a good chance crowdsourcing will be useful. Otherwise it may well become just an other system and killed after a while for lack of results, since by definition one needs to be ready to get answers from “a crowd with low wisdom”, as one of the commenters put it.

The second aspect of this is to generate the same openness and motivation in the crowdsourcing community. It’s more difficult, or at least less conventional means need to be used, since one doesn’t have the traditional intra-company change mechanisms at one’s disposal. There the Finnish culture provides some interesting pointers: there is a strong respect and interest for one’s environment, but it’s more out of well-understood self-interest than for holistic reasons. And it works. In my mind this points to fairly down-to-earth incentives for crowdsourcing programs, which is good: this is the way all business transactions work, and the more crowdsourcing in integrated into the “usual” ways of doing business the more accepted and useful it probably will be.

Up here in the North there is a strong tendency to simplify things. I wonder if the above arguments are too simplistic for this discussion ?

In any case thanks for providing a forum and good luck !

Francois