Dumb crowds and innovation lessons

The Global Ideas Bank was lucky enough, when it started off as a website, to have the backing of a pretty amazing web guy: Flemming Funch, who set up and ran the New Civilization Network. Flemming now lives in the south of France, and blogs under the marvellous title of Ming the Mechanic. Always worth a read, particularly when Flemming gets on a (blog) roll, as he is at present.

So a couple of great articles via Ming the Mechanic:

- The Dumbness of Crowds is a great little piece about the difference between "collective intelligence" and "dumbness of crowds". Such as:

"Collective intelligence" is a pile of people writing Amazon book reviews.

"Dumbness of Crowds" is a pile of people collaborating on a wiki to collectively author a book...

For all those (such as myself) who got carried away by the wisdom of crowds....... (see sundry previous blog posts!)

- Ming also points to a great article on Innovation Tools (which I foolishly stopped taking the feed from) asking their readers what they learned about innovation in 2006; lots of good and interesting stuff here too.... such as:

"Passion is the linchpin to innovation. "Innovation" is a big fat generic concept in most corporations... like "God" or "life on other planets" or "empowerment." Unless the individuals within a given corporation have a genuine sense of urgency, personal ownership and passion for innovation, nothing significant will happen. Innovation begins within the mind of each person. Corporate initiatives that don't awaken the basic human instinct to innovate within each individual will be doomed" - Mitch Ditkoff

Comments

[Dave Duarte]

That's a good point... Have you seen the article "Digital Maoism" on Edge (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html) also, checkout Joe Jaffe who is crowdsourcing chapter 10 of his latest book... Creativity is the point at which collective intelligence falls flat methinks.