It is usually one (or both) of the following: create or decide. 

Creating is generating something new, like for example t-shirt designs. Deciding is evaluating and selecting the best choice among alternatives, like for example selecting among t-shirt designs.

Building block 1: What is the task at hand? 

Building block 2: Who is doing the task?

Motivators include money, love, and glory.

Love is defined as enjoyment of the activity, enjoyment of the opportunity to socialize with others via the activity, or feeling that one is contributing to a larger cause. Appealing to love and glory over money tends to reduce the costs. However, providing money and glory makes it easier to control the direction in which a crowd moves and how quickly they achieve the goal.

Building block 3: Why are people performing the task?

This building block is split into two categories based on whether one is creating or deciding.

Building block 4: How is it being done?

Each gene and its variants have specific outcomes/goals and thus are best used in certain combinations and types of systems.  

What Gene is Best Used In a What Situation

Despite the power collective intelligence holds, many businesses are not using it because they don’t understand how to do so. To shed some light on this confusion, a study at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence analyzed almost 250 examples of web-enabled collective intelligence, and identified building blocks to explain how these systems function. These building blocks answer the following four questions: What is the task at hand? Who is doing it? Why are they doing it? How is it being done?

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Google uses the collective intelligence of the entire web to present impressively accurate answers to questions typed into the Google search engine. Wikipedia is the world’s largest encyclopedia, offering high quality information with practically no centralized control. The clothing company Threadless allows people to submit t-shirt designs to a weekly contest, then produces a select few designs from those that are most highly rated by users. So this means that for businesses, collective intelligence can be used to (a) know consumer desires and (b) create products that satisfy these desires at little to no cost.

Examples of the success of collective intelligence in companies

Malone, Thomas & Laubacher, Robert & Dellarocas, Chrysanthos. (2010). The Collective Intelligence Genome. IEEE Engineering Management Review. 38. 38-52. 10.1109/EMR.2010.5559142. 

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