Ignoring the Wisdom of the Crowds

Ignoring the Wisdom of the Crowds

Crowd-sourced knowledge is often vaunted by technologists like Clay Shirky as a critical development to the future of humanity.

But while crowd-sourcing is good at some tasks, creativity, including the kind required to create an innovative product or company, isn’t one of them. Jason Cohen describes how in creative situations, the crowd finds the result that everyone hates the least.

For startups, eliciting emotion is critical, meaning the result that everyone hates the least is the one you absolutely want to avoid.