crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large, often online, crowd rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. It leverages distributed problem solving and collaboration, typically via digital platforms. Tasks range from simple data entry to complex R&D problems.

The term was popularized by Jeff Howe in 2006 in Wired magazine, describing a shift of tasks to a crowd. Since then, crowdsourcing has broadened to include crowd labor, crowd wisdom, and crowdfunding, with use across business, science, government, and nonprofit sectors.

Common forms include ideation or design challenges where participants submit solutions; microtasking where a large number of people perform small tasks; and data gathering or validation via user contributions. Crowdsourcing platforms include microtask markets, collaborative wikis, and open innovation marketplaces. Crowdfunding is a related model where the crowd funds a project rather than contributing work.

Examples include Wikipedia’s crowd-edited content, Kickstarter campaigns, and Waze’s crowdsourced traffic data. In science and engineering, platforms like Innocentive host problem-solving challenges; in business, firms use crowdsourced ideas to accelerate product development.

Benefits include access to diverse expertise, scalability, potential cost efficiency, and faster problem solving. Challenges concern quality control, IP and licensing, data privacy and security, labor practices, and dependence on platform ecosystems. Effective crowdsourcing requires task design, participant incentives, governance, and robust validation.

Ethical and legal considerations include ownership of contributed content, licensing terms, consent for data use, and fair compensation. The approach complements traditional outsourcing and internal R&D, contributing to open innovation and collaborative problem solving.