Here’s a neat example of crowd sourcing in action. “Ten Thousand Cents”, is a digital artwork project by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima. The project consisted of drawing a digital picture of a $100 bill. The catch here is that it divided the bill into 10,000 pieces and sourced each piece individually. The project payed 1000’s individuals, each working separately from one another, one cent per section paid through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk – making the total cost of the design work $100.

According to Koblin and Kawashima, “The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.”

You can purchase prints of the project directly from the website for, of course, $100. The proceeds of each print will be donated to the One Laptop per Child project which, as they point out on the project’s website, was formerly known as the $100 laptop.

As this project rightly points out, we’re just beginning to see the implications (and potential benefits) of breaking the mold and using non-traditional means of doing business. What I’d love to see is more companies and organizations that operate under an older and more rigid model explore projects like these. There are enough industries (music industry, I’m looking in your direction) who are struggling to maintain failing business models that the justifications not to try creative solutions are shrinking. This begs the questions, what would it take to push more companies in the direction of a project like this?