The Ignorance of Crowds

Nicholas Carr, ever the optimist, uses Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar [PDF], to sermonize on the limitations of the open source model for innovation, in strategy+business magazine. If you're not familiar with Raymond's paper, Carr summarizes it as follows:

Traditionally, sophisticated programs had always been "built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation." An open source project, in contrast, was the product of a large and informal community of volunteers who in aggregate "seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches." What was amazing, Raymond wrote, was that "the Linux world not only didn't fly apart in confusion but seemed to go from strength to strength at a speed barely imaginable to cathedral-builders."

With the advent of the Internet, an efficient vehicle for information exchange, the bazaar took off. Innovation didn't need to be pursued in isolation. Individuals connected real-time, could share ideas and evolve products. And here's where Carr thinks the limitations lie. The open source model -- the bazaar of the internet -- has only proven itself adept at evolving ideas that already exist. It's an optimization model, whereas new, truly innovative ideas, tend to come from individuals, or small, intimately connected groups.

The approaches of the cathedral and the bazaar really need to be intertwined. The individual wizard is much more capable of begetting original creations, unhindered by limitations. The bazaar, while appearing chaotic and democratic, is really a platform of focus, discipline and autocracy -- best suited to optimize, and squeeze efficiency and value out of the original creations of the wizards. From a business perspective, Carr writes:

So if you're looking to bolster your company's creativity, you should by all means look for opportunities to harness the power of the crowd. Just don't expect the masses to take the place of the lone wizard or the band of mages. The greatest breakthroughs will always begin, to quote Eric Raymond once more, with "one good idea in one person's head," and the greatest products will always reach perfection through the concerted efforts of a highly skilled team.