Now we come back to the notion of what is knowledge? And you know that there are many takes on it. But the philosophers had argued for some time that knowledge is true (whatever that means) justified or warranted belief. That is to say, a lot of people had opinions, but it doesn’t become knowledge until you are willing to act on it. You are going to act on it, when you believe it enough, when your actions are on the line. 

The question of incentives

   And so we have a triple win. And this will show how stupid we were, not understanding the social dynamics of this. After we constructed the system, we saw this thing happen. Some of these ideas were worth a fortune. They were saving huge amounts of money. So we went back and we suggested that we give bonuses to people who were really contributing, and we need your advice to the system. And then what happened was that the technical communities themselves said: “No, no way”. In essence, they were saying: “We don’t want extrinsic motivation to replace intrinsic motivation.” As soon as you start giving us bonuses, we’re going to game the system, it will undermine the system in terms of the social structure that we have built here and so on. 
   Now one thing that I wonder is whether we didn’t offer large enough bonuses. If I had offered them a million dollars apiece, then who knows what would have happened. I think it would have actually tearing up the social fabric that we were constructing, in the sense that the construction of meaning, a sense of identity by becoming .. we had incredible stories,  of people in Brazil saving huge amounts of money by way of an idea that came out of Canada and this guy in Canada was now a hero of Brazil, and so on and so forth. 

The business results of Eureka

   What’s also interesting, we were able to measure some of the consequences of this by running controlled experiments in various countries. This is one example. We got a chance to measure what I call the learning curve of people in this community using this six month controlled test, in a two year field deployment. They got a 300% improvement in the whole group’s learning curve. To us, 10% reduction in service time and parts used was a huge amount of money. Fewer long or broken calls – this idea worked much better for the complicated stuff than the easy stuff. And increased customer satisfaction. So one could say very well: Eureka for Eureka!