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at ASSET India. They just don’t have the right expertise. It’s because Zacary Brown has such an enormous comparative advantage that he and ASSET can work together for mutual benefit. More generally, the attention of the right expert at the right time is often the single most valuable resource one can have in creative problem solving. Expert attention is to creative problem solving what water is to life in the desert: it’s the fundamental scarce resource. InnoCentive creates value by restructuring expert attention, so that people such as Zacary Brown can use their expertise in high-leverage ways: InnoCentive helped Zacary Brown focus his expertise on ASSET’s problem, instead of working at home on his hobbies.

In this chapter we’ll see that it’s this ability to restructure expert attention that is at the heart of how online tools amplify collective intelligence. What examples such as InnoCentive, the Polymath Project, and Kasparov versus the World share is the ability to bring the attention of the right expert to the right problem at the right time. In the first half of the chapter we’ll look in more detail at these examples, and develop a broad conceptual framework that explains how they restructure expert attention. In the second half of the chapter we’ll apply that framework to understand how online collaborations can work together in ways that are essentially different from offline collaborations.

Harnessing Latent Microexpertise

While the ASSET-InnoCentive story is striking, Kasparov versus the World is an even more impressive example of collective intelligence. As in the ASSET-InnoCentive story, Kasparov versus the World relied on a restructuring of expert attention. To understand how this worked, let’s return to the game-making move suggested by Irina Krush, move number 10, the move Kasparov praised as “a great move, an important contribution to chess.” Krush’s suggestion didn’t come from thin air. She had the idea for move 10 a full month before Kasparov versus the World began, during a study session at the World Open chess tournament in Philadelphia. At the time, she did a brief analysis, and talked the move over with her trainers, grandmasters Giorgi Kacheishvili and Ron Henley, before putting the idea aside. It was a lucky chance that Kasparov versus the World opened in a way that let Krush use the move she’d been considering in Philadelphia. It certainly wasn’t something she could completely control, because Kasparov was playing the white pieces, and so playing first, which allowed him to dictate the initial direction of the game. Still, a full week before move 10 was played, Krush and her trainers were alive to the possibility that the game might head in this direction, and began to analyze the pros and cons of Krush’s idea more intensively.

It’s important to appreciate that in nearly all ways Kasparov was far and away Krush’s superior as a chess player. We can express the gap between them quite precisely, since there is a numerical rating system that is used to rate chess players. In that rating system a good club player will have a rating in the range of 1,800 to 2,000. An international master such as Irina Krush will have a rating around 2,400. In 1999, at the time of his game against the World, Kasparov’s rating peaked at 2,851—not only the highest rating in chess history, but considerably higher than any other player’s rating before or since. The 450-point rating gap between Kasparov and Krush was roughly the same as the gap between Krush and a good club player. It meant that Krush would only stand a chance of winning a game against Kasparov if he made a major blunder. This is not to say that Krush was a weak player—remember, she was the U.S. women’s champion—but at the time of the game Kasparov was in another class.

Given the large gap in ability between Kasparov and Krush, it appears very fortunate that the game unfolded in a way that gave Krush a chance to exploit her extremely specialized expertise about the opening that led to move 10. In this narrow slice of chess, she was Kasparov’s superior,