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Kaggle.com is still missing the point of Crowd-Innovation – unleashing the Value of the Fourth Revolution

Did you hear about Kaggle.com? It is one of the most innovative startups of 2011 according to Business Insider. Agreed, it is an improvement on the model of “Open Innovation” developped by Innocentive or Ninesigma, but unfortunately it still misses the point of collaborative innovation, or Crowd-Innovation.

Kaggle is bringing together scientists (mainly data-scientists) to participate in collaborative competitions to solve difficult problems. It boasts a network of 17,000 PhD-level people.

Heritage Health Prize on Kaggle — Are you ready to contribute on Kaggle.com?

Have a look at their sites and the different possible competitions. The most well known is the “Heritage Health Prize” with a prize of 3 million US$: Can you predict who will turn up at the hospital next year based on people’s medical history / historical claims data?

Of course that’s the outlier; most competitions have a prize of 10,000$ or less, and are mainly rewarded by community recognition among the world’s best data-crunchers, or free trips or the ability to present in a well-known conference. You can help to improve prediction of insurance claims, rating of pictures, or help NASA bring evidence of dark matter!

It appears that Kaggle brings something more than Innocentive or Ninesigma, who also bring together the problems of large companies and a worldwide network of passionate problem solvers. Kaggle develops the concept of competition where people can see the result of others in real time, which is a form of deep motivation. Yet Kaggle still stops short of where the power of the Collaborative Age lies: collaboration between participants.

The right format of “Open Innovation” is still to mature. Will it be through companies, foundations, non-profits? How is real time feedback given about the performance of other competitors? How can we develop a spirit of true collaboration between the participants above and beyond competition, a tight community to solve the hardest problems?

The value of “Open Innovation” needs to be unleashed completely. Actually “Open Innovation” needs to be transformed into “Crowd-Innovation” because it is just that we want to achieve: getting people to collaborate meaningfully on a problem they are passionate about.

What will become of our Industrial-Age huge and rigid research organizations? They’ll have to open to the crowd or die.

Even Innocentive, Ninesigma and even Kaggle still need to go one step further or they will struggle to continue. Who will find the right concept, allowing cooperation between participants to develop?

How Eric Schmidt (Google) was almost right, but not quite

“Every day we produce as much content as was produced by all of mankind for the 20,000 years before 2003” [Eric Schmidt, former CEO, Google] (quote from Seth Godin’s book ‘we are all weird‘)

Actually this quote is wrong. This content is not only produced. It is published. And that’s what makes the difference.

Think about it.

Think about that incredible amount of information at our fingerprints.

And think about how easy it is today to access and find any kind of information from anywhere in the world.

Latest stats from Facebook: more than 250 million photos uploaded every day, 800 million users, half of which connect every day. Twitter: 300 million tweets are sent every single day. There are millions of blogs. 135 million professionals on LinkedIn.

“Every day we produce as much content as was published by all of mankind for the 20,000 years before 2003″

And you’re still not a believer of the Fourth Revolution?

Facebook today is the internet of 2004

Do you believe things change quickly? Facebook, today, represents the same size than the entire internet network in 2004.

And remember that Facebook service was launched in… February 2004!

The internet itself has bloated dozens of times.

17 years ago, when I graduated, email was still a rare thing reserved to companies and universities.

Let’s just put that in perspective: in less than 20 years our way of communicating has changed dramatically. In less than 7 years internet has become social. Many people could not think about communicating without Facebook and Twitter.

The tools are here. The social and political consequences might take some more time. Still, they are inevitable. The Fourth Revolution is here.

Don’t miss it.

Would you guess that people read more or less with digital books?

Today Amazon sells more digital books than physical books. This is a dramatic shift in this industry and publishers struggle to adapt. The struggle of an industry – an institution – seeing its Industrial Age business model crumble should not hide the most important: the actual dissemination of information.

people read more books with e-readers like Amazon's Kindle — e-readers like Amazon's kindle make people read more books

Overall, do people read less or more books than before?

According to this MediaPost detailed article and statistics, people who have bought e-books tend to download and read more books than before. It appears to be statistically significant.

Why is that? For sure, clever marketing by Amazon makes it easy to download and consume more. When it comes to reading, my own experience is that the small, lightweight and convenient size of e-books allows to read in many places like the underground train or whenever there is a short break. And I definitely read even more since I have an entire library inside my Kindle, making a switch from a book to another easy.

So, the introduction of e-books did not kill reading. It increased it, at the same time as it made many non-mainstream or old books available to everybody. And, taking into account the vast amount of other information we read on other media, such an availability of high quality information is unprecedented. It will necessarily be the source of many creative innovations.

Think about it. I can download on my e-reader in less than 1 minute any title available worldwide without the bother of the logistics of sending physical books over (and I am living in Singapore, so this problem is particularly sensitive!). WOW.

Who said the Fourth Revolution is not yet here?

The ever shorter lifespan of ever more immortal information

Evidence is there that the lifespan of information on internet is always shorter. A nice article on the bitly blog, “You just shared a link. How long will people pay attention?”, provides a nice synthesis. The following graph is extracted from this post:

Basically, a twitter or facebook post lifespan (in terms of viewing, clicking, re-tweeting etc) is a mere matter of minutes. Only Youtube videos have a lifespan of a few hours.

Is that really true? All this information is staying somewhere. The information is still there, more or less accessible, but searchable. Even where we thought his information was not accessible, it can come back: Facebook is right now digging the information out for its timeline; tweets can be searched. Beyond the flurry of the initial re-tweets and sharing, a long tail of search results and clicks still keeps the information alive.

This is the paradox of modern data on the internet. The flow of information is so immense that our attention span becomes ever shorter. Yet, the information remains there, accessible, searchable, available for us to build upon it. More and more information from more and more contributors, worldwide.

And those will be successful in the Collaborative Age who, beyond the instantaneous, will know how to dig the heap of historical information for the nuggets they are looking for. That’s certainly a K.E.E.N. skill. How often do you dig deeper for more information instead of letting yourself be overwhelmed by the present notifications? Just do it more often!

The time spent on social networks by users went up by 30% in one year

According to Nielsen studies, the time spent on Facebook on average in the US is now (August 2011) almost 8 hours per month – up from a bit less than 6h in August 2010.

That’s the average for 163 million US Facebook users. Or, in total, an astonishing cumulative 54 million days spent by all US Facebook users during that month. Communicating, chatting, sharing, collaborating.

It’s a flood of collaboration. Is that time wasted or time used appropriately? Some bloggers seem to think it is time wasted: see for example http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/wasting-time-on-facebook/. The name of the link is revealing of the mindset of the writer, although the post itself is just named “You spent 8 hours a month on Facebook [STATS]“.

Well people obviously find an interest and prefer to go on Facebook rather than watching TV. And although many Facebook posts are quite superficial, no doubt there are nuggets there ready to be harvested.

The Fourth Revolution is just kicking off. Time spent on Facebook and other social networks generates value. How do you benefit from this value?

Still skeptical about the Fourth Revolution? Read this post, and experience it firsthand!

Have you seen this video on TED? “What we learned from 5 million books” video on TED.

The idea is dead simple but only the Fourth Revolution would allow it. Based on Google’s now huge and unprecendented database of scanned books, researchers have setup a tool that looks for the frequency of words depending on the date of publication.

The 5 million of books they use as a basis is quite a representative sample (4%) of the 129 million books ever published.

Not only that, but the tool is available online at http://books.google.com/ngrams, an interactive tool that lets you test your own words or combination of words, and look at how they evolve over time. I can testify that you can spend some time playing with it (and that’s an understatement). I just put here three examples I have done myself – all graphs range from 1800 to 2008

In the first example, using the frequency of the words “farmer”, “worker”, “employee”, “servant” and “slave”, we see how the concept of servant (yellow) disappears over time, while “workers” (red) and “employees” (green) are newer concepts.

In the second example, with the words “spiritual”, “intellectual” and “emotional”, we see how the frequency of “spiritual” diminishes after 1860, while “emotional” is quite a new word growing through the 20th century.

In the third example, we just watch the Fourth Revolution ignite, with the words “collaborative” and “networking”:

collaborative networking n-gram — collaborative networking chart

The incredible thing is that you can yourself do your own research, because the data from the 5 million books (approximately 500 billion words!!) is there, at the reach of your mouse, anywhere in the world.

I write about the Fourth Revolution but that does not mean I am not WOW’d by it regularly. WOW! Try it yourself on Google n-grams interactive site. And watch – the more this tool will become known, the more people will use its graphs to illustrate historical tendencies. Private people will do their own research. Humankind’s collective cognitive capability will be unleashed.

What a better illustration of the Fourth Revolution? This would have just been impossible 2 years ago. WOW.

6 key practices to leverage the value of Fourth Revolution communities

In the previous blog about “How the Fourth Revolution dramatically increases humankind problem-solving ability”, we’ve observed a great case-study of how leveraging the Fourth Revolution contribution capabilities led to a quick and effective solution to an unsolved problem.

What can we learn from this example on the conditions for this to happen?

Here are 6 key conditions:

have a large enough community because the percentage of people that are going to involve themselves deeply is small (the minimum size of the community depends on their initial level of engagement, but is at least a few thousand members). That might take some time to build up, which means giving out for some time as an investment; and any pre-existing network is clearly an asset;
make sure the community has an emotional engagement into the topic (due to personal or family history, the particular topic, or make the medium addictive in itself), and that the topic has a lot of meaning to them – aligned with their self-purpose;
allow the community members to communicate with each other transversely;
offer recognition to great community members contributions (not only external recognition: internal recognition inside the community is also appropriate); even better, allow community people to rate each other’s contributions;
interact with the community by responding in a reactive manner to issues and questions so as not to lest unwanted issues fester;
provide regularly challenging, unconventional problems that tie with the sense of meaning of the community.

Do the community network that you hope to leverage follow these 6 guidelines? What can you do today to improve the health of your network and benefit from the Fourth Revolution value?

How the Fourth Revolution dramatically increases humankind problem-solving ability

Fourth Revolution minded researchers use online games to solve difficult scientific problems by appealing to a much larger community of contributors.

The best example to date can be found in the article “gamers solve molecular puzzle that baffled scientists”.

By crowdsourcing the search for the best 3-D molecular configuration they were able to get the help and support from a large community. By making it like a game, they leveraged an emotional appeal to the effort. And they solved a previously unsolvable problem in only 10 days!

This example is particularly noteworthy because anyone – no need to have any knowledge in molecular physics – can play the game. But don’t believe it is an isolated case. Such competitions and game are spreading through all disciplines now, to leverage contribution from anywhere in the world.

What is always amazing, though, is that at the end, the number of really dedicated, passionate contributors is always very small – no more than a dozen or a few dozen. But because the tools attracts talent from around the world, the best suitable, available people are there. And from their kitchen, stay-at-home moms can contribute to the progress of science.

Also noteworthy in the article is how the final discovery built on top of the progress made by other members, and how the small community of dedicated hard-core members is deeply in conversation. The lone genius concept is definitely obsolete.

Welcome to social community-based science.

Welcome to the Fourth Revolution’s value and knowledge production system.

A new media: interactive e-books

The future is in interactive e-books. Watch this e-book demonstration at TED by Mike Matas.

Interactive e-books need the contribution of a production team.

The richness of this media is that a book becomes a door to access the vast amounts of information on the internet. The interaction with the device also leverages our emotions and creates an entirely new interaction with the book.

Still, what makes a book different? In a recent blog, Seth Godin makes the point that a book is the work of a single author. That’s what makes it different from collaborative creations. And even in the Collaborative Age, we need to be able to hear the divergent voices of individuals.

When do you start raising your voice in the world?

How algorithms change our world – the Video of the month on the Fourth Revolution website

VIDEO OF THE MONTH: How algorithms shape our world, a TED talk by Kevin Slavin.

A great video that shows how algorithms now change our world – not just virtually but also physically. The insights are fantastic – and sometimes scary. The Fourth Revolution at work, live!

Discover this resource and others in the …Value Creation System resource page… and other resources in the other thematic chapters in the resource center of the Fourth Revolution website!

Thanks: Thanks to Laurent Riesterer for pointing out the video!

Social networks dynamics like you have never seen them

The New-York Times research lab is developing an application that allows to visualize the dynamics of social networks. How some people serve as linchpins for the diffusion of information.

Have a look at

http://www.nytlabs.com/projects/cascade.html

there is a video that shows better than any words how that works. It is astounding. The information diffusion cascade is shown in real time. You can understand how it spreads (or not). No doubt we are now in the midst of the Fourth Revolution!