Crowdsourcing in Chicago

I am a great fan of the Goldcorp story (how a Canadian gold company was going broke in 1999, posted all its most confidential mine info on net, challenged people to come up with new mining strategies, and got lots of great answers that helped it recover), so always interested in see the same kind of logic applied in the public sector. I recently saw this great story from Chicago where the Chamber of Commerce offered a $5000 reward for ideas on how to increase ridership on their bus system will reducing the environmental impact. They got 125 proposed solutions and were apparently very impressed with the overall quality of contributions - the winner being a local writer who put in a 16 page document detailed his ideas for improvements. The article concludes that this sort of approach could squeeze out use of consultants, since a $5000 competition gives better results than a $50,000 piece of work by consultants.

So case closed? It is tempting to say that since a $50,000 piece of work by consultants will usually be worth nothing, anything else must be better than it. However, that would be a cheap and unworthy crack, so I will avoid making it. I do think it is great the Chicago Chamber of Commerce went for it as they did, but I don't think this story shows that public sector organisations should be running competitions whenever they face a challenge (which is probably 10 times a day). It is hard to tell whether the competition really came up with something they had not thought of  before and in any event the true cost of the competition is obviously rather higher than th $5,000 reward. Conversely, perhaps a lot of the benefit of the competition is the publicity for the issue and the organisation and the debate they generated about their objectives. So maybe the competition helped even if it did not really generate anything new. And even where it came up with "old" ideas perhaps by being part of the winning solution, these ideas will get help these ideas get over the barriers that have been holding them back up to now. So very probably well worth doing and certainly reinforcement of the message that the public sector is uniquely well placed to benefit from freely offered external input, but not for me proof that crowdsourcing is the answer to everything. What do others think?