What is Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is a sourcing model in which an individual or an organization gets support from a large, open-minded, and rapidly evolving group of people in the form of ideas, micro-tasks, finances, etc. Crowdsourcing typically involves the use of the internet to attract a large group of people to divide tasks or to achieve a target. The term was coined in 2005 by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson. Crowdsourcing can help different types of organizations get new ideas and solutions, deeper consumer engagement, optimization of tasks, and several other things. 
Let us understand this term deeply with the help of an example. Like GeeksforGeeks is giving young minds an opportunity to share their knowledge with the world by contributing articles, videos of their respective domain. Here GeeksforGeeks is using the crowd as a source not only to expand their community but also to include ideas of several young minds improving the quality of the content. 

Where Can We Use Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing is touching almost all sectors from education to health. It is not only accelerating innovation but democratizing problem-solving methods. Some fields where crowdsourcing can be used. 

1. Enterprise
2. IT
3. Marketing
4. Education
5. Finance
6. Science and Health

How To Crowdsource?

1. For scientific problem solving, a broadcast search is used where an organization mobilizes a crowd to come up with a solution to a problem.
2. For information management problems, knowledge discovery and management is used to find and assemble information.
3. For processing large datasets, distributed human intelligence is used. The organization mobilizes a crowd to process and analyze the information.

Examples Of Crowdsourcing

1. Doritos: It is one of the companies which is taking advantage of crowdsourcing for a long time for an advertising initiative. They use consumer-created ads for one of their 30-Second Super Bowl Spots(Championship Game of Football).
2. Starbucks: Another big venture which used crowdsourcing as a medium for idea generation. Their white cup contest is a famous contest in which customers need to decorate their Starbucks cup with an original design and then take a photo and submit it on social media.
3. Lays:” Do us a flavor” contest of Lays used crowdsourcing as an idea-generating medium. They asked the customers to submit their opinion about the next chip flavor they want.
4. Airbnb: A very famous travel website that offers people to rent their houses or apartments by listing them on the website. All the listings are crowdsourced by people.

There are several examples of businesses being set up with the help of crowdsourcing. 

Crowdsourced Marketing

As discussed already crowdsourcing helps grow businesses grow a lot. May it be a business idea or just a logo design, crowdsourcing engages people directly and in turn, saves money and energy. In the upcoming years, crowdsourced marketing will surely get a boost as the world is accepting technology faster. 

Crowdsourcing Sites

Here is the list of some famous crowdsourcing and crowdfunding sites. 

1. Kickstarter
2. GoFundMe
3. Patreon
4. RocketHub

Advantages Of Crowdsourcing

1. Evolving Innovation: Innovation is required everywhere and in this advancing world innovation has a big role to play. Crowdsourcing helps in getting innovative ideas from people belonging to different fields and thus helping businesses grow in every field.
2. Save costs: There is the elimination of wastage of time of meeting people and convincing them. Only the business idea is to be proposed on the internet and you will be flooded with suggestions from the crowd.
3. Increased Efficiency: Crowdsourcing has increased the efficiency of business models as several expertise ideas are also funded.

Disadvantages Of Crowdsourcing

1. Lack of confidentiality: Asking for suggestions from a large group of people can bring the threat of idea stealing by other organizations.
2. Repeated ideas: Often contestants in crowdsourcing competitions submit repeated, plagiarized ideas which leads to time wastage as reviewing the same ideas is not worthy.