The Contribution Revolution

by Mark on September 30, 2008

The October edition of the Harvard Business Journal has a contributed article by Intuit co-founder Scott Cooke on how to build your business using communities. I thought it interesting that he used many of the standard “crowd-sourcing” examples like Skype and Wikipedia but no open source software examples. Given Intuit’s proprietary nature I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Some tips from Scott that I like:

  • Protect experiments from your company’s natural control instincts.
  • Let enthusiasts and young employees provide ideas and leadership
  • Let users “vote,” early and often.

He makes some other suggestions that I am not sure I agree with in every case but they apparently worked for Intuit. Definately a worthwhile read if you are a community builder.

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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

jspad September 30, 2008 at 9:48 am

You might want to check out the companion site to the article, http://usercontribution.intuit.com

It’s a wiki, so you can edit out the “and young employees” part over there, or comment on it, or add open source examples to the site.

Full disclosure: I work at Intuit (as a not quite so young employee) and I worked on the wiki.

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