Nicholas G. Carr wrote an excellent article, “The Ignorance of Crowds,” about the limitation of crowd-sourcing or open source software. He focuses on the experience of Linux and Wikipedia. The masses primarily serve as bug-fixers for Linux, whose development is closely managed by a small team; Wikipedia is attempting to bring in similar control to address issues such as “The Flintstones” having twice as long an entry as Homer.

Carr argues that the choice is not “The Cathedral” or “The Bazaar” as presented in a seminal paper by Eric Raymond, but how to use both approaches. Further he argues that really radical or disruptive innovation is more likely to emerge from the Cathedral model led by a few elite leaders. 

Anyone involved in innovation should read the full article at:

http://www.strategy-business.com/article/07204