Managing the human cloud

MIT Sloan Management Review

Volumn 54, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 23-32

  Kaganer, Evgeny ^a   Carmel, Erran ^b   Hirschheim, Rudy ^c   Olsen, Timothy ^d  

^a IESE BUSINESS SCHOOL   (Spain)

^b AMERICAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^d ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84875781091     PISSN: 15329194     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (7)

1. massolution, "Crowdsourcing Industry Report: Enterprise Crowdsourcing - Market, Provider and Worker Trends," (Los Angeles: massolution, February 2012).
2. Two other related phenomena are human computation and collective intelligence. Human computation takes advantage of human participation directed by a computational process in order to solve problems that computers alone cannot yet solve. For example, Google-owned reCAPTCHA leverages human computation to transcribe books and newspapers for which optical character recognition is not yet effective. Collective intelligence is more of an umbrella term that covers phenomena in which, as Malone, Laubacher and Dellarocas write, "large, loosely organized groups of people work together electronically in surprisingly effective (and seemingly intelligent) ways." Examples of collective intelligence range from Linux, the first major open-source software development community, to Threadless, an online community where members submit and vote on T-shirt designs that the company then manufactures. While human-cloud initiatives can include elements of both human computation and collective intelligence, the concept of the human cloud is narrower in scope and focuses only on paid outsourcing arrangements that involve a buyer, an intermediary platform and a pool of virtual suppliers. See A.J. Quinn and B.B. Bederson, "Human Computation: A Survey and Taxonomy of a Growing Field," Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: CHI, 2011), 1403-1412;
3. T.W. Malone, R. Laubacher and C. Dellarocas, "The Collective Intelligence Genome," MIT Sloan Management Review 51, no. 3 (spring 2010): 21-31.
4. J. Howe, "Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business," (New York: Crown Business, 2008).
5. massolution, "Crowdsourcing Industry Report,"
6. Our framework extends the arguments put forth by Malone, Laubacher and Johns in their recent article "The Age of Hyperspecialization." While their primary focus is on microtasks (covered by the Aggregator model in our typology), our discussion spans the entire human cloud landscape. See S. Cullen, P. Seddon and L. Willcocks, "Managing Outsourcing: The Life Cycle Imperative" MIS Quarterly Executive 4, no. 1 (March 2005): 229-246;
7. T.W. Malone, R.J. Laubacher and T. Johns, "The Age of Hyperspecialization" Harvard Business Review 89 (July-August 2011): 56-65.