Outsourcing was for the last decade, Crowdsourcing is for the next.

Let me put it this way, if Outsourcing was like inventing a computer, Crowdsourcing is like inventing internet. Outsourcing saved costs for companies, improved quality sometimes, finished projects in shorter time lines, created opportunity for innovation and it even got tax benefits. Outsourcing forced companies to re-think and sometimes re-structure their revenue models. Crowdsourcing will not only change revenue models, it is most certainly going to change business models, radically. Here is Jeff Howe’s definition: “Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job/task traditionally performed by a designated agent/employee and outsourcing it to an undefined, large group of people in the form of an open call”.

A crowd is diversified, no hierarchy, no notion of team, a crowd has everyone from an amateur to a specialist, a crowd can produce the best. However, a crowd has shorter attention span and can produce more junk than good work, so you need filters to separate wheat from chaff.

Crowdsourcing is not a new concept. Jeff gave the concept  a new name in 2006. The Oxford English Dictionary used to run few open contests for readers and contributors to send in new words and definitions. Innocentive.com is another great example of a global crowd of engineers, scientists and innovators to join a community to solve some of the world’s toughest challeneges. Coca-cola’s facebook page (over 3.7 million fans) is another example of how they created fans from cutomers and utilize them to develop/test a new product or a commercial or a viral video. If this can be achieved with web 2.0 then wait for 3.0 and if the metaverse (second life) is web 3.0, then it seems to show that it is already Crowdsourcing (all users/avatars collaborate to develop a product).

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