Data Mining and the

Innovation of the Crowds

Jeff Lynn21 October 2011

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Text/data mining already flourishes, but only the owners of the material and their licensees can participate

Data Mining: The Problems We Face Today

That creates two problemso It means less material can be mined

• If relevant material is owned by a multitude of rights-holders, each may only be able to mine a portion

• This is bad, for obvious reasons

o It means fewer people can do the mining• Only those with a direct connection to the rights-holder can get involved

• I see this as even worse, but the reasons may not be obvious

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Instead, they turned to crowdsourcing and developed a programmed called Connect & Develop.

Proctor & Gamble had long relied on their internal product development staff of over 7,000 people.

◦ In 2000, they realised that 7,000 would not be nearly enough to innovate fast enough to meet customer demand

◦ The traditional approach would have been to hire more internal staff

The Power of Crowdsourcing:A Case Study from P&G

P&G posts product development tasks to a public website

◦ Includes the price they will pay for the project to be completed

◦ Members of P&G’s extended dev team respond with proposals

◦ The work is awarded to the best solution

Connect & Develop

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As a result:◦ There are now 1.5 million people in P&G’s extended network◦ Over 50% of P&G’s product initiatives involve significant

collaboration with outside innovators

◦ P&G remains one of the most successful consumer goods companies in the world, with its share price increasing ~150% since the programme started

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P&G’s a great story, but at the end of the day is just about making tastier Pringles

Imagine This in Data Mining

Think about what would happen if you had a pool of 1.5 million people using different techniques to mine data from thousands of:o Biomedical research paperso Historical newspaper articleso Analyses of public sentimentso Endless other data sources that are already in the public domain

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As much as anything, crowdsourced data mining is what the digital economy is supposed to be about

◦ Utilising the low costs of communication to tap the talents of lots of people

◦ Improving collective human knowledge by taking advantage of the individual knowledge of people spread around the world

Conclusion

And it’s also what copyright is supposed to foster o We have IP laws solely to promote innovationo If the IP laws don’t allow crowdsourced data mining, then what

are they for?