What is Crowdsourcing?

The term “crowdsourcing” was coined by Jeff Howe back in 2006, in a Wired article which described a new way of sourcing people who are willing to help or work on a project. Enough people with sufficient time can transform into a lot of available manpower. For small, manual tasks such as tagging vast amounts of photos, instead of outsourcing to a large company, it’s more feasible and affordable to use a crowdsourcing marketplace like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Crowdsourcing is the practice 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.This process is often used to subdivide tedious work or to fund-raise startup companies and charities, and can also occur offline. It combines the efforts of numerous self-identified volunteers or part-time workers, where each contributor of their own initiative adds a small portion to the greater result. Crowdsourcing is distinguished from outsourcing in that the work comes from an undefined public rather than being commissioned from a specific, named group.

It is in essence:

• Coordinating a crowd (a large group of people on the web) to do micro-work (small contributions) that solves problems (that software or one user can’t do)

• A collection of mechanisms and associated methodologies for scaling and directing crowd activities to achieve goals

It helps in the process of getting work or funding, usually online, from a crowd of people. The word is a combination of the words 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'. The idea is to take work and outsource it to a crowd of workers.

Famous Example: Wikipedia. Instead of Wikipedia creating an encyclopedia on their own, hiring writers and editors, they gave a crowd the ability to create the information on their own. The result? The most comprehensive encyclopedia this world has ever seen.

Crowdsourcing & Quality: The principle of crowdsourcing is that more heads are better than one. By canvassing a large crowd of people for ideas, skills, or participation, the quality of content and idea generation will be superior.

Features

• Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem solving and production model.

• Users--also known as the crowd--typically form into online communities based on the Web site, and the crowd submits solutions to the site or produces its contents.

• The crowd can also sort through the solutions, finding the best ones.

• These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place--the crowdsourcer

• The winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded.

• Many individuals in the crowd participate just for intellectual stimulation or because of emotional ties to product or service

Crowdsourcing vs Outsourcing

Steps to apply Crowdsourcing

Steps to apply Crowdsourcing

Advantages of Crowdsourcing

CS does have many advantages, when truly used for the benefit of mankind and not just for commercial profits. For instance, it can be used as a way to decrease hunger, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, and prejudices simply by making the mass populations more aware of the extent of these social problems. The crowdsourcing allows millions of people to become aware of the issue and to actively work on ways to resolve them.

It is also a good way for people to share and gain knowledge about anything and everything. Many breakthroughs in various fields of research have been made by tapping into the combined intelligence and capabilities of the general population. Numerous breakthroughs have also been made by tapping into the combined intelligence and capabilities of specifically targeted sectors of the mass population. Unfortunately, not all of the breakthroughs have benefited the masses as much as they have benefited individual commercial enterprises

Problems can be explored at comparatively little cost.

Payment is by results.

The organization can tap a wider range of talent than might be present in its own organization

Turn customers into designers

Turn customers into marketers

Connects businesses to their audience and consumers

Better solutions/products using collaboration and competition than traditional outsourcing

The products which have been raised through the crowds are in effect market tested

Overhead and admin costs minimum because majorly achieved through freelancing community

Emerging innovators/designers/thinkers get an opportunity to become market leaders

Robust linkages make knowledge transfer/sharing best practices easier & help pool resources to develop initiative

Disadvantages of Crowdsourcing

By providing their skills, knowledge and creative talents for less than minimum wage, people participating in CS are providing businesses with an alternative to hiring highly qualified employees. They are also helping the businesses avoid outsourcing the work to other businesses and professional freelancers. They are also contributing to the poorer quality in many products and services, such as magazines, newspapers, health management care and customer care services.

Additionally, they are contributing to the trend for replacing humans with machines to do various jobs, such as in the office and clerical fields. Due to volunteers working on CS projects, computers are being “trained” to replace office clerks, secretaries, receptionists, transcriptionists and customer care specialists. Professional writers, photographers, reporters, editors, and printing offices are also becoming redundant as various tools of the trade become imbued with artificial intelligence and speech recognition technology.

Some of the major disadvantages are:

• Little/No guarantee about the efficacy, sufficiency and quality of the end product

• Often there is little or no pay for participants which results in difficulties in project & co. sustainability and consumer loyalty

• Management has to deal with huge scale of workers often posing difficulties in collaboration

• Drives down the market value of once high priced professional products & services by allowing amateurs to compete in the market

• Low credibility and accountability of workers and intellectual property leakage

• Intellectual property leakage

• Ill-will with own employees

How Can Entrepreneurs Motivate Crowdsourcing Participants?

• Learn from what others have done by identifying and using known motivational drivers to achieve early success

• Create a selection and range of motivational drivers, and learn by varying those drivers

• Select implementation details that are matched to the particular context and identify relevant motivation drivers

• Consider the geographical and cultural diversity of the target crowd

• Employ multiple motivational drivers to obtain the full benefit of crowd diversity