Many highly skilled workers are underemployed. It is not uncommon for a highly skilled engineer to be working in a completely unrelated field because he can’t find work in the occupation he was trained in. For the engineer, the longer he works in an unrelated field the more his skills atrophy.
So, how can the engineer and the world take advantage of this cognitive surplus?
The open source movement has allowed skilled workers to use their skills to help develop open source products. This movement provides the engineer the opportunity to keep his skills current while providing useful products for people. If you think open source products produced by volunteers are inferior to products produced by highly paid engineers in large corporations, you may want to think again. I’m writing this blog post using OpenOffice Writer. It cost me nothing to download and was produced by volunteers. It is certainly as robust as, and I would say more than, Microsoft Word. Linux, MySQL, FireFox, and WordPress are just a few example of very successful open source products. Social development sites, such as Quirky, connect the skilled worker with products and ideas that can use their skills.
How can you leverage cognitive surplus personally or for your business?
