A platform for facilitating mass collaborative product realization

In today's networked world, a recent trend is to tap onto the vast human resource available online for performing various tasks. The resulting phenomenon is known as mass collaboration where large numbers of people collaborate to perform various tasks. The availability of human resource on the network presents opportunities to tap onto the competencies of people outside of the core team in product realization. However, new mechanisms are necessary to facilitate mass collaborative product realization. This paper proposes and evaluates a platform that provides different mechanisms for harnessing the collective intelligence of large numbers of people in product realization. (C) 2009 CIRP.