Jeff Howe (l) and Joi Ito (r)
Crowdworks is adding some serious brain power to its team. The company announced today that MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito and WIRED magazine contributing editor Jeff Howe will join the company as advisors.
Crowdworks, a leading crowdsourcing service in Japan, has significantly burnished its credentials with the addition. Howe, in addition to his WIRED duties, is known for coining the term “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 article. Ito is also a director of Digital Garage, home of DG Incubation and Open Network Lab in Japan.
Ito is known for having a good eye for evaluating companies, counting Twitter, Flickr, and Kickstarter among his wins. His advice is highly sought after and he is a board member at Sony, The New York Times, and Mozilla Foundation, among others. He was also on the board of Viki when that company was acquired by Rakuten.
This move is the strongest indication yet that Crowdworks is preparing to become an international business. All signs suggest that Howe does not speak Japanese, meaning his usefulness for building connections and so forth is essentially limited to outside of Japan. For Ito, his breadth of connections across Japan and America are sure to come in handy as well.
Both men expressed their interest in crowdsourcing and Crowdworks in a pre-taped video comment. “Hopefully Crowdworks will push Japan from this monolithic, top-down work environment to something more creative and will meet the challenges of moving out of the factory model to the information society,” Ito said.
That is a tall order for Crowdworks, especially as it tries to replicate its domestic success abroad. Typically Japanese tech companies have had some difficulties in capturing market share overseas. Industry titans DeNA, Gree, and Rakuten all have fallen short of their lofty world-beating goals.
Even so, Howe sees reason for hope in the Crowdworks model. “Unlike some American companies like Elance or oDesk which really [offer] temp jobs […] Crowdworks is using the crowd for innovation as well,” he said.
See: Japan’s Viibar wants to turn underappreciated video producers into well-paid freelancers
Crowdworks isn’t a kid anymore, adds Joi Ito and Jeff Howe as advisors
