“Crowdsourcing has become a popular way of making use of large groups of people to accomplish straightforward tasks – online reviews on Yelp, Wikipedia entries and Stanford University’s own Folding@Home, to name a few. A significant downside is that, because these projects usually rely on an inexpert workforce, they need to be built from basic and highly specific tasks that any person can carry out. Those limitations make traditional crowdsourcing impractical for the kinds of complex tasks many organizations need to accomplish – a challenge that researchers at Stanford tried to overcome with a new, more structured approach to crowdsourcing complex tasks, called flash organizations. “Traditional crowdsourcing can’t be applied to the most important goals that we, as humanity, want to pursue because these goals are open-ended and complex,” said Michael Bernstein, assistant professor of computer science at Stanford. “They simply cannot be predefined and cannot be broken down into thousands of independent parts. They require adaptation, re-planning and change that’s incompatible with traditional crowdsourcing.””