Below is Chapter 3 from my book Getting Results From Crowds 2nd Edition, provided as a resource for those looking at using crowdsourcing in their organization or tasked with building an internal business case.

The business value of using crowds

Through history, companies have been limited in what they can achieve through the scope of their internal resources and how well they can draw on external resources. Crowdsourcing has the potential to create enormous value for businesses by giving easy access to an essentially unlimited pool of talent and capabilities. Those organizations that have the skills and competences to draw on external crowds, as well as in tapping the best ideas from their ‘internal crowds’, have an immense advantage over those companies that rely solely on their internal resources and traditional service firms.
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This morning I gave the opening keynote at the Project Management Institute NZ Annual Conference on The Future of Project Management.

My keynote covered the fundamental trends shaping business, government, and projects, the changing nature of work and organizations, the new capabilities required by project leaders, and the nature of leadership for the future.

You can see the slides to my presentation here. Below is a summary of one of the core ideas I shared.
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I wrote an article for the most recent issue of Company Director magazine on seven ways boards can support and drive innovation.

The slightly edited final version is on the Company Director website. The full original text is below.

How Boards Can Support and Drive Innovation

One sixth of Australian businesses with a turnover of over $10 million in 2014 did not exist four years later. In some cases that was due to classic reasons such as cashflow management challenges, over-extension or project mis-management. However an increasing proportion of corporate failures is due to insufficient response to changes in the operating environment, including rapid technological progress, shifts in social attitudes and consumer behaviour and disruption from new business models.
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In 2006 I wrote a popular article Six Facets of the Future of PR, which concluded:

We are entering a world in which the flow of information and perceptions will drive much of the value creation in a highly networked global economy. The PR industry should be looking forward to a time of massive prosperity, in which it extends itself to play in entirely new fields of media and communication. Yet many of the existing participants will need to adopt a new stance and actively develop new skills to do this effectively. Those that re-conceive their role and potential impact, could well be masters of the universe.

As I anticipated, as the marketing and PR landscape has evolved over the last dozen years, some firms that were traditionally in the PR space have been very successful in transitioning to a new positioning, while others have been left far behind in a rapidly changing world.
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By now we have extensive evidence that supporting diversity in society and business is not just the right thing to do, it significantly improves outcomes.

In organizations a primary focus of diversity and inclusion initiatives is of course on employees, senior management, and board members. However for many sound reasons it is also critical to focus on diversity of suppliers.

As such I was deeply honored to give the closing keynote at the annual Supply Nation Connect Conference last week in Sydney.
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