Idea Crossing's Nyssim Lefford to present at Santa Fe Institute workshop

On March 25th, 2008, Nyssim Lefford Ph.D., Director of Research and Senior Producer will speak to a cadre of executives on

"Crowdsourcing, Crowdcasting, Competition and Creativity"

Crowdsourcing and crowdcasting are processes by which organizations 
broadly publicize a problem and offer prizes for solutions. In 
contrast to traditional outsourcing that relies on contracted 
individuals or organizations to solve problems, crowdsourcing gives 
many people an opportunity pose solutions and be rewarded for their 
ideas. Frequently, the target “crowd” represents a diverse set of 
skills and perspectives, and may be comprised of amateurs or 
professionals from disciplines seemingly unrelated to the problem 
space. These crowds generate innovation.

Founded in 2003, Idea Crossing produces idea competition experiences for companies, 
institutions and organizations that want to use crowdcasting to 
stimulate innovation, impact the discourse around a problem space, and 
identify talent. Through careful game design, we leverage competition 
to foster strategic problem solving and creative concept development. 
We produce large-scale competitions for globally recognized brands such as
American Express, Hilton, Harley-Davidson, Shell, Red Hat and others.
The idea competitions involve thousands of participants distributed across the planet.

While designing competition rules, we consider several types of 
behaviors that relate to creativity, communication, ideation, 
perception and innovation. Each competition we produce has a unique 
structure and set of constraints tailored to the outcome desired by 
the competition sponsors and the characteristics of the “crowd” they 
hope to “source”.



Decisions 2.0: Distributed Decision-making
Business Network Workshop
March 25, 2008, Washington, DC

An increasingly complex, fast moving and connected world poses new challenges for government, non-profit and commercial organizations. Organizations of all sizes are in need of a new paradigm for decision-making that reflects a more distributed, and often less hierarchical structure. For example, in the military, asymmetric warfare against terrorist threats requires a shift from traditional command and control to distributed and decentralized decisions

Numerous examples of disaster response, from the 2004 tsunami to hurricane Katrina, have demonstrated the power of distributed decision-making by people on the ground. Organizations from aid agencies to airlines to music retailers are experimenting with adaptable and evolvable models are proving powerful means to transcend of traditional top down information flows.

Acknowledging that decisions made at the head office may not fit local realities is the easy part, developing parameters and systems for devolving control, while still maintaining accountability and organizational efficiency present a challenge for today’s leaders.
While it is clear that the harnessing the collective intelligence and transforming the organization into a broker of information will be key components of organizational dynamics, how these new principles will map into the structure of diverse organizations is not obvious.

For more than 20 years, SFI has been at the forefront of the science of collective intelligence, promoting themes such as swarm intelligence, self-organization, decentralized problem-solving, collective choice theory, in fields ranging from biology to engineering to economics. While technology may have caught up with the theory in the form of Web 2.0, a practical framework for understanding, supporting and managing these new modes of decision-making – Decisions 2.0, is still lacking.

This SFI workshop will examine the theory and practice of decentralized and distributed decisions in government, non-profit and commercial organizations. We will also discuss the costs and benefits of decentralized/distributed decision-making. While decisions gain in robustness, self-organization, adaptability, innovative potential, organizations may become more difficult to control, harder to “program”, and more unpredictable.