E-Learnabout

We have all heard about jobs being outsourced and how cheaply products and services can be had in cheaper labor markets.  Just as few people understand the semantic web, businesses who harness the power of outsourcing together with game theory can defeat their competition before they know what hit them.

Let me give two examples of companies who applied knowingly, or not, the application of outsourcing and game theory with exceptional results.

What is Game Theory?

Let’s start with a definition from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Game theory is the study of the ways in which strategic interactions among rational players produce outcomes with respect to the preferences (or utilities) of those players, none of which might have been intended by any of them.”

Goldcorp

Goldcorp and its CEO Rob McEwen launched the Goldcorp Challenge, which was put in place to  outsource the finding of the location of where Goldcorp’s next great find of gold would be.  After making all geological data previously held in secret open to the public, along with a half million in prize money, the game was on.  The results cut years off exploration time and transformed Goldcorp from a 100 million dollar company to one valued at over 20 billion.

Synthasite

Synthasite, a web 2.0 website creator, held a similar competition offering shares in their company to anyone who created a design template which could be used by Synthasite users.  Reading over the blog posts and replies, some people thought it was a good idea, some did not.