For Melissa Valentine and her colleagues at Stanford, the future of work is here: “flash teams” of skilled professionals who have probably never met before and may work on different continents, but who can turn a napkin sketch into a product within days or weeks.

Valentine, assistant professor of management science and engineering at Stanford School of Engineering, is part of a team that is advancing both the theory and the practice of complex work in the “gig” economy.

Basic crowdsourcing, in which companies hire independent contractors for temporary projects, is already a signature feature of the modern economy. Companies that offer pools of on-demand workers, such as TaskRabbit and Amazon Mechanical Turk, are thriving. But that kind of crowdsourcing is usually reserved for very simple or narrowly defined tasks: household chores, writing a patch of software code, or translating a document. With flash teams, Valentine and her colleagues are exploring how a large number of people with different skills can collaborate on work that moves through a series of phases.

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