Gold Rush 2.0

Isn’t it great? How anything that fits a UTP-cable is hype worthy nowadays? It’s not said that any and all initiatives will be successes. But it’s obvious this is the time to develop ideas and to innovate. One CEO however took the term “gold rush” very literally; He actually promised a heap of cash to anyone that could help him find the most gold.

When Goldcorp had trouble finding new gold veins they handed over their precious geological data to the public, offering over half a million dollars in prizes to the persons or cooperations that would find the best new drilling targets. The results were impressive: at 80% of the places that were suggested by the ‘crowds’ gold was actually found. As a result of the competition 8 million ounces of gold were found (that’s 3 Billion $).

CEO McEwen: “The Goldcorp Challenge successfully harnessed the instantaneous global reach of the Internet and tapped into the intellectual capital, creativity and insight of some of the world’s best geological minds”.

The example is quite well known (also due to this book), however two things are very significant: Goldcorp is not a hyped web 2.0 company but a good oldfashioned mining company. And furthermore, studying geological data is not trivial (we could kind of guess that from the reward), yet the public had that expertise (not just everyone ofcourse).

What is so significant about this? Well, first of all it shows us that CrowdSourcing moved beyong the stage ‘webbased companies’ and therefor out of the realm of hype. Second of all it shas shown itself to be more than just a toy where some enthousiasts think of unpractical abstract concepts. For me this is a sign that CrowdSourcing is moving away from the gold rush stage.