Emerging Collective Intelligence Business Models

This paper essays an approach to the emergence of new business models based in collective intelligence through the inclusion of crowdsourcing in business processes. To contextualize this phenomenon, we present a brief sate of art, highlighting some key terms fundamental to understand collective intelligence and its impact in the business environment and on how organizations are changing the way they perform and produce products and services. First we approach Web 2.0 and the difficulties of a scientific definition for this expression. Then we have a look into crowdsourcing boost, consequence of the new possibilities opened by Web 2.0 applications and enabled by technology evolution. Regarding Collective intelligence we give particular attention to Malone's Collective Intelligence genoma, due to the possibilities of understanding Collective Intelligence phenomenon brought by this framework into organization's business models. Then we focus on business models, particularly in the importance of new web 2.0 crowdsourcing based ones in creating value, particularly in the new trend of business processes experimentation supported by collective intelligence activities. We present collective intelligence as having the potential to generate new business models and will present examples of well-succeeded cases. Finally, we present some examples of Portuguese collective intelligence business models and derive some conclusions regarding future research challenges.