Our current understanding of how organizations can be designed is based primarily on observations of the large hierarchical organizations that rose to prominence in the 20th century.   But over the past decade, the rise of the Internet has led to the emergence of surprising new forms of collective intelligence, including Wikipedia, Linux, Google, eBay, and many others.   This project involves categorizing and analyzing these new crowd-based ways of organizing work.

The project is identifying a set of design patterns (or “genes”) that can be combined and recombined to create systems that harness the intelligence of crowds.

Publications
Malone, T. W., Laubacher, R., & Dellarocas, C.  The Collective Intelligence Genome, Sloan Management Review, Spring 2010, 51, 3, 21-31 (Reprint No. 51303)

Malone, T., Laubacher, R., & Johns, T.  The Age of Hyperspecialization, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2011, 89(7/8): 56-65

Early work on this project included development of an online Handbook of Collective Intelligence, editable, like Wikipedia, by anyone interested.  This site is no longer actively being edited, but is included here for historical reasons.
Videos
The Future of Work 2.0, Interview with Prof. Thomas W. Malone by Harvard Business Review, July 29, 2011

Very Small Business: Rise of the Micro Job, On-stage interview with Prof. Thomas W. Malone, The Economist conference on Human Potential: The Great Unrest, New York, NY, September 27, 2012

People
Principal Investigator
Thomas W. Malone

Collaborators
Robert Laubacher
Chris Dellarocas (Boston University)
Tammy Johns

Project Alumni
George Herman
Richard Lai