Crowdsourcing is gaining a lot of credence as one of the most compelling methods we have ever seen for acquiring knowledge. It also may be a huge money-saver.

I was just interviewed and quoted in a USA Today article by Jon Swartz, who documented the incredible efficiencies to be gained by tapping into social networks to solve problems or come up with new ideas. “Penny-pinching companies are hiring specialists to plumb the vast resources of the Web in search of cheap expert help,” he writes. Crowdsourcing “is gaining momentum among businesses, non-profits and individuals who are getting work done at a fraction of the normal cost.”

Crowdsourcing seems to be strong — or at least most visible — in the advertising sector, he observes. For example, “since 2007, Frito-Lay has dangled prize money and the promise of Super Bowl airtime to wannabe ad execs to create a TV spot for its Doritos chips. It gets thousands of entries and has chosen spots as good as something a Madison Avenue agency might produce for hundreds of thousands of dollars.”  In another example, PepsiCo “sponsored a contest that resulted in 30 viral videos for Pepsi’s Aquafina Splash. Pepsi paid $10,000 for three of the videos, which were viewed more than 400,000 times.”

In the article, I cited government agency adoption of crowdsourcing to address vexing environmental challenges. The example I had in mind was how the Oil Spill Recovery Institute, established by Congress after the Exxon Valdez spill, went out to a social network of engineers and scientists to find a way to clean up Prince William Sound. The solution that came back worked.

The idea of harnessing collective intelligence from the network was also recently explored by Aaron Saenz, who  observes that collective intelligence (CI) has supplanted individual Intelligence Quotient (IQ) as the new measurement of value.  As he put it: “A slight rise in individual intelligence can’t compare to the effect of hundreds of millions of people going online in the next decade. Internet connectivity is increasing quicker than biology could every hope to keep up with.”