Here’s an interesting video about the social networking service for doctors, Sermo , the experience of which was also reported in Business Week recently.

The founder of Sermo makes a number of interesting points. While the press makes a lot of the payment scheme, he says that it only represents 0.1% of the contributions, that the sums are embarrassingly small, and that there is no direct connection between what they share and what they get. In fact, he says, it is the community itself which fuels and motivates the contributions. All of this confirms the general insights on the crowding out phenomenom.

The business model is that the pharmaceuticals pay for access to the information which is generated through the ‘medical wisdom of crowds’. In fact, he claims that most medical innovation today is the repurposing of existing medicines, and that this comes out of the experience of doctors, not the research labs of the industry, hereby confirming Von Hippel’s insights on the role of user innovation