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But there are pitfalls. "The biggest caveat is the issue of curation. It's great you opening the gates up to everybody - but all of a sudden you're going to get a lot more stuff."

"We later learned that it was this revolutionary business model. I think the reason it's so pure like that is the reason it's worked so well as a crowdsourcing company."

"I think that the way companies are seeing crowdsourcing is a lot different from the way we see it. They are looking at it as this new business model, as a way to outsource your work to an anonymous crowd of people. We're more about giving people something productive to do with their passions."

it's not so much the software that makes the company, it's the community

"It's an affordable way to be ahead. You're able to see what your customers are thinking and what they're dreaming of, and you're able to measure that against what you're doing."

His concern is that by "mining" the crowd in this way, the wealth that results from the work done remains concentrated in the hands of the people who put out the call - ultimately endangering jobs and the economy. Mr Lanier also believes that crowdsourcing threatens creativity.

"One of the lessons I've learned is that so many of these great innovators, Darwin is a great example of this, one shared characteristic they all seem to have is a lot of hobbies."

So what should companies be doing to foster innovation in their workforces?

"I think there's this abiding belief that markets drive innovation, corporations drive innovation, entrepreneurs driven by financial reward drive innovation, and while that's certainly true in many cases there's also this very rich long history of important world-changing ideas coming out of the more or less intellectual commons of the universities.

"Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down; but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent."