In statistics and business, a long tail of some distributions of numbers is the portion of the distribution having a large number of occurrences far from the “head” or central part of the distribution. In business, the long tail represents the vast majority of people who were not productive enough or consumptive enough to be serviceable at the high collaboration costs of professional organizations. Reduction in collaboration cost is unleashing a whole new framework through which value is created and capabilities orchestrated within society through the harnessing of the so-called “crowd” within open organizations – the mass of people, each of which only has a small amount to contribute, but when summed up it comes to a powerful force.
