What is crowdsourcing?

What is crowdsourcing? It is essentially outsourcing to customers and other average people.

Want a more technical definition? Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

Procter & Gamble, as I discussed in Connect + Develop, employs more than 9000 scientists and researchers in corporate R&D and still have many problems they cannot solve, so they go to the crowds. They now post these on a website called InnoCentive, offering large cash rewards to more than 90,000 “solvers” who make up this network of backyard scientists, according to Open Inovators. P&G also works with NineSigma, YourEncore, and Yet2, as well as BrainReactions.

BrainReactions essentially is organized and controlled crowdsourcing. Companies outsource their idea generation to us to help them develop new products, packaging or marketing messages. We deliver those ideas to them and promise confidentiality. This type of outside innovation works very well, because it comes from the customer, and it is less expensive than internal R&D.

Other famous users of crowdsourcing include YouTube, Threadless, Lego, iStockphoto, and Digg.

To read more about crowdsourcing please check out the OpenInnovator blog. To learn about specific strategies of crowdsourcing, check out Sami Viitamaki’s FLIRT model.

Wired wrote a bunch of articles on crowd sourcing this summer.

The Rise of Crowdsourcing.
Look who's Crowdsourcing.
What does Crowdsourcing Really Mean?
Exploring the Dark Side of Crowdsourcing.
Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book.
Using Crowd Power for R&D.
News the Crowd Can Use.
The Experts at the Periphery.

That's enough reading for one day! If you want a brief overview of some of these articles check out the SourcingInnovation blog.

Crowdsourcing and Politics??? That's right, in just a few hours you can watch youtube users interview democratic candidates on CNN.