Introduction
Tongal, eLance, and Topcoder Will Change How You Compete
Who will be your next competitive threat? Will it be an established firm that ups their game, a young upstart company that bursts onto to scene, or a competitor from a different industry all together? What if your challenger isn’t a traditional organization at all, but instead a “talent platform” that doesn’t actually have employees? Talent platforms—such as Mechanical Turk, eLance, Topcoder, and Tongal—organize free agents and offer new ways to get work done. They’ve come on to the scene by stealth, often as seemingly innocuous job boards for temporary workers, but they’re turning into much more than that. They can now pose a real threat to established organizations.
