Collective Intelligence and Social Computing: A Literature Review

In recent years the rise of 2.0 applications and platforms, commonly known as “social software”, has been promising to provide firms and organizations with new ways of communicating internally and externally. The main characteristics of these solutions are to improve information flows at many levels and between different actors. Its most credited potential lies in the support to team work and project management where people, by exchanging information and knowledge, can act – collectively – more intelligently than the sum of single individuals, producing what is referred to as collective intelligence. This emerging concept – as such still under definition – can be described according two different perspectives: at a conceptual level it is the intelligence emerging from the distance collaboration of a multitude of individuals based on on-line software systems and, at the IT level it is the bunch of user-centric applications often addressed as social computing that enhance an high degree of community formation and exchange of information. This research paper aims at defining a comprehensive framework of social computing and collective intelligence to draw a coherent and non-redundant picture of this rapidly growing domain. Through a multidisciplinary approach we identified about 160 articles, published after 1990 on conference proceedings and journals in the fields of information systems, knowledge management, organization science and innovation management. Within this set 60 relevant articles were reviewed in order to infer a limited set of n aggregated definitions and identify the related most promising areas for future research.