Creative problem solving requires skills that robots can’t automate. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report concluded that “human” skills like originality, initiative, and critical thinking are likely to increase in value as technology and automation advances. Knowledge work is location-independent, intangible, and can be shared at zero marginal cost. Non-routine knowledge work requires creative and innovative approaches to solve complex problems. Or, as Esko Kilpi puts it: “[…] the kernel of on-demand work is not short-term associations and spot market exchanges, but in allowing us to create a new understanding of work: contextual interaction based on collaborative creativity and human capital.”

To be successful in complex and non-routine challenges requires teamwork. Traditional talent management of large organizations often overemphasizes the individual versus the team, yet it doesn’t take more talented specialists to solve a complex problem but a team. Given the trends on fragmentation and concentration, Deloitte expects that more and more of the workforce will be pulled into the arena of creative gig workgroups. Hagel puts it as follows: “Very broadly, the gig economy is likely to evolve from a focus on routine tasks to a focus on creative work. As this evolution plays out, we’re likely to see the focus of work shift from individuals to small, sustained workgroups driven by a desire to learn faster together. In turn, this will lead to a shift from work that is defined by short-term transactions to work that is pursued in the context of rich, trust-based, and sustained relationships.”Crowdsourcing today is impressive in terms of distributing work among independent individuals, but its future success will require collaborative work crowds. Existing crowdsourcing techniques achieve complex goals via pre-structured microtask workflows. However, seminal research from the field of organizational design has established that structured workflows are fundamentally incompatible for intricate work.