Criticism of Crowdsourcing

I’m fascinated with the concept of crowd sourcing whether it be iStockphoto, Threadless, Crowdvine, eLance, the social news site Digg, or the local company Studio Now which crowd sources video production. I’m equally fasinated with companies that experiment with it as a way of collaboration or market it, including those who successfully deploy it like Starbucks.

A recent Forbes article lodged an interesting critique of Crowd sourcing or perhaps identified a prominent misconception about crowd sourcing which could lead to misleading expectations and perhaps even failure:

For the past 10 years, the buzz around open source has created a similar false impression. The notion of crowds creating solutions appeals to our desire to believe that working together we can do anything, but in terms of innovation it is just ridiculous.

There is no crowd in crowdsourcing. There are only virtuosos, usually uniquely talented, highly trained people who have worked for decades in a field. Frequently, these innovators have been funded through failure after failure. From their fervent brains spring new ideas. The crowd has nothing to do with it. The crowd solves nothing, creates nothing.

The author continues

So what’s my problem? Why does it bug me that people think crowdsourcing is something it is not? Why do I care that people think a crowd is capable of individual virtuosity? What bugs me is that misplaced faith in the crowd is a blow to the image of the heroic inventor. We need to nurture and fund inventors and give them time to explore, play and fail. A false idea of the crowd reduces the motivation for this investment, with the supposition that companies can tap the minds of inventors on the cheap.

Does crowdsourcing exist as it is popularly conceived? Yes, it does, but it doesn’t have anything to do with innovation. Jigsaw, the community-created database of 16 million business contacts, is crowdsourcing.

It sounds to me that collaboration isn’t magic and its not a panacea. Similarly there isn’t an invisible hand which will just make your website like the passionate communities on Craigslist, Wikipedia, Yelp, or Facebook. Those communities are built…

Perhaps this article goes too far in criticizing the role of collaboration, but does point to a more balanced and more truthful approach to social networking communities, collaboration in enterprise 2.0, and social media.

What other criticisms have you seen? How do you believe this changes the nature of the discussion over crowd sourcing or what makes a crowd sourcing community successful?