Chapter 8
Crowd Storming, Crowd Sourcing, Collaboration, Co-Creation
People working together to solve problems is not in itself anything new, it is one of the fundamental building blocks of civilization. But the Internet facilitates a kind of crowd collaboration, allowing individuals to more easily come together to discover, to create, to evolve, or simply to complete tasks. Even very complex tasks such as an encyclopedia that was developed entirely through voluntary efforts by individuals, most who don't know one another, and making their contributions from all over the globe.
Simply reducing the friction in communicating and collaborating has made entirely new behaviors possible—crowd-sourced encyclopedia content where an interested amateur might create the initial article but then trained experts (and other amateurs) could join in and help improve the content.
Author Francis Gouillart's book The Power of Co-Creation details how companies around the globe are reinventing their businesses by bringing stakeholders together to identify and solve problems in new ways.1 In a 2011 Harvard Business Review article titled “Experience Co-Creation,” Gouillart explains that companies must reinvent their existing “inert touch points” into interactive and collaborative experiences. He writes that customer experience must be redesigned:
By designing engagement platforms—the physical and virtual places through which customers can interact with the company and other stakeholders in order to ...
