From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Crowdsourcing, a modern business term coined in 2005, is defined by Merriam-Webster as the process of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers; a portmanteau of “crowd” and “outsourcing,” its more specific definitions are yet heavily debated.

This mode of sourcing is often used to divide tedious work between participants, and has a history of success prior to the digital age—”offline,” see the linked and examples appearing.

Crowdsourcing is similar to Social collaboration due to the fact that social collaboration also brings together different people for the sake of contributing towrads a collective task.

By definition, crowdsourcing combines the efforts of numerous self-identified volunteers or part-time workers, where each contributor, acting on their own initiative, adds a small contribution that combines with those of others to achieve a greater result; hence, it is distinguished from outsourcing in that the work comes from an undefined public, rather than being commissioned from a specific, named group. 

Regarding the most significant advantages of using crowdsourcing the literature generally discussed costs, speed, quality, flexibility, scalability, and diversity.

Crowdsourcing refers to a wide range of activities, providing different benefits for its organizers.

Crowdsourcing in the form of idea competitions or innovation contests provides a way for organizations to learn beyond what their “base of minds” of employees provides (e.g., LEGO Ideas).

Crowdsourcing can also involve rather tedious “microtasks” that are performed in parallel by large, paid crowds (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk).

Crowdsourcing has also been used for non-commercial work and to develop common goods (e.g., Wikipedia). Arguably the best-known example of crowdsourcing as of 2015 is crowdfunding, the collection of funds from the crowd (e.g., Kickstarter).