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​Melissa Valentine: The future of work could be “flash teams”

Can you crowdsource the production of a complex project? Melissa Valentine, an assistant professor of management science and engineering, says yes.

iStock Photography/Makkuro_GL

iStock Photography/Makkuro_GL

Imagine you’re a medical student and you work in the emergency department and you have an idea for an app that uses GPS to track ambulances as they approach the hospital.

Could you crowdsource the production of this complex project? Melissa Valentine, assistant professor of management science and engineering, says yes. This, she hypothesizes, is the future of crowdsourcing and, for some industries, the future of work. Valentine and her collaborator, computer science professor Michael Bernstein, call these crowdsourced groups “flash teams.” In this video, Valentine explains how flash teams operate and how they took the medical student’s idea above and made it a reality, efficiently and effectively.