This Week In Crowdsourcing: News Roundup, March 7

A curated, weekly roundup of interesting news on crowd-driven business, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, open innovation and the collaborative economy.

The first-ever social investing platform TrakInvest is set to democratize equity investing information with their model of transparency and collective intelligence. TrakInvest’s goal is to level the long-uneven playing field for those who don’t have access to privileged investment knowledge and information. The disruptive initiative has garnered support from venerable institutions across Asia’s academic, financial, and media industries. [TrakInvest: Crowdsourcing Financial Wisdom in Asia, Huffington Post]

Companies may want to start thinking about how they can participate in the collaborative economy, according to a new report Sharing Is the New Buying by Crowd Companies, Jeremiah Owyang, and Vision Critical. The report, which surveyed more than 90,000 people, categorizes the taxonomy of the collaborative economy, classifies it’s participants, and identifies three models companies can use to get involved. [The Collaborative Economy Is Exploding, And Brands That Ignore It Are Out Of Luck, Fast Company]

[Note: Jeremiah Owyang will be giving the keynote address on April 8th at the Crowdsourcing Week 2014 Global Conference in Singapore, April 7-11, 2014]

Startups like Udemy have provided a refreshing new take on educational courses, forging a path to rethinking how and where we learn. Yet academic research is one area of a University’s mission that still has vast opportunity to also be transformed by technology. How? Via new research networks, the rise of crowdfunding, and open access publishing, for starters. [From Crowdfunding To Open Access, Startups Are Experimenting With Academic Research, TechCrunch]

For healthcare, the truly important innovations are the kind of high-end disruption that will spur pressing and fundamental change . Here Julie Wheelan, VP of Marketing for Edison Nation Medical, thoughtfully cites several approaches and industry examples that she believes move beyond low-end innovation to help “shape an entirely new paradigm for where and how healthcare innovations are uncovered.” [Using Open Innovation to Deliver High-End Healthcare Disruption, WIRED]

Higher education is ripe for an overhaul and digital technologies will be a major fuel to facilitate. Expert predictions on the future of education named crowdsourcing, especially the ability to gamify and crowdsource research, as having particularly broad potential accelerate productivity. Augmented reality and 3-d printing were also selected as technological innovations set to revolutionize education. Read all five expert predictions here: [The future of higher education? Five experts give their predictions] 

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