Collective Intelligence & Grupthink
Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 by Jamsterson - Grupthink TeamWhile Grupthink is being used today mostly for fun stuff, we believe the site holds great potential for helping groups of people solve problems. Group problem solving is a hard problem itself; how do you tease out the good ideas and gems of brilliance possessed by each individual and emerge with a coherent decision? How do you benefit from the group’s collective intelligence?
MIT has a special research facility working on this very question. Recently renamed the “MIT Center for Collective Intelligence“, the Center is pondering questions like:
What would it mean for a group of people to be “intelligent”? For instance, if a single superhuman intelligence had access to all the knowledge and resources of a company like IBM or General Motors, what would it do? What strategies would it pursue? How quickly could it respond to changes in the marketplace? How productively could it use factories and money? How profitable would it be? And-most importantly-how closely could we approximate the behavior of this imaginary superhuman intelligence by cleverly connecting real people and computers? [link]
We’re not sure if Grupthink will ever answer these questions. But groups of people working together can do amazing things, and digital tools which help to organize and aggregate the group’s thoughts and opinions can play a crucial role in harnessing collective intelligence. And if people are having fun while doing it, all the better!
November 8th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
Many thanks for the site, I think it is a great idea. I think Grupthink could be used really seriously by the market reserch community. We are beginning to question the way we work and a few of us have started calling it Research 1.0, and we are looking for Research 2.0. In the past the market researchers always decided when to ask questions, what the questions are, and what the answers should be.
Have you tried talking to any of the big online access panels such as SSI, LightSpeed or Greenfield? I think this appraoch would be a great way of allowing respondents to take control of part of the process, and express their views without the filter of the constructed survey.
In order to make things useful to people like me or my clients, it woudl be necessary to do things like only asking people within a specific country, which is why working with online panels might be a great way of doing it.
All best regards
Ray
Ray.tfp
UK
November 8th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
Hi Ray, thanks for your thoughts. We haven’t spoken to the panels you mention, but one of the (we hope) most useful applications of Grupthink will be in aggregating group feedback, particularly wishlists and feature requests. As you might have seen, we’re doing this here: http://www.grupthink.com/topic/1
We also peripherally explored the topic here: http://blog.grupthink.com/2006/07/19/grupthink-as-product-review-engine/
Let us know what you think!
October 5th, 2011 at 1:03 am
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