Pro-Am is the new entrepreneurship

The Pro-Am term – a contraction of Professional and Amateur – was originally coined to refer to sport competition mixing professionals and amateurs or to players evolving in an intermediate status between those two categories. It then extended to scientific collaborations between amateurs and professionals in disciplines, such as astronomy, where it has been traditionally easier for amateurs to make a valued contribution.

Today Pro-Am has become a major socio-economic trend. It is estimated that in mature economies 30 to 40% of people are Pro-Am at something. My friend Emma, who works as a chemist in the energy sector, is a cupcake pro-am (see pic). Other colleagues are pro-am mechanics. Between the rubbish and the advertizing, YouTube is full of amateur performances of professional standard. Three factors have directly contributed to this trend:

Lego Minecraft: a Christmas Day lesson in crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is not just for new entrants challenging established players; the latter can also leverage crowdsourcing to their advantage, enabling users to design new products and testing the demand at the same time.

And for the younger generation, this is simply a normal way of doing things. That’s the key lesson I learned this morning as I heard my youngest son explain the genesis of his Lego Minecraft set.

Crowdsourcing solutions to the Gulf oil spill

Hutch Carpenter asks on Blogging Innovation: should BP crowdsource potential solutions for the Gulf oil spill? Crowdsourcing has indeed proven its value time and again. In We Think Charles Leadbeater demonstrates its power to harness the collective brains of people across the globe to design strategies to solve problems more effectively and rapidly than formal organisation could ever do.

In his post, Hutch examins three factors that might be holding BP back: