Evaluating Crowdsourcing – offering a bright future?

Crowdsourcing can bring a diverse community together to help solve vexing questions and real challenges, extending the concept of open innovation. However, organizations need to carefully consider the potential benefits and risks of crowdsourcing before implementation. There are many buts that come with crowdsourcing, and organizations need to partner with experts or specialized resources to host their crowdsourcing challenges. The lack of a repeating process may drive up the origination costs, and organizations need to determine the impact they are looking for, the reach potential, different engagement possibilities, satisfaction of participants, and the cost of implementation. Crowdsourcing has several objectives, including solving problems, funding new ideas and businesses, identifying insights, delivering awareness, launching products/services or creating breakthrough innovation. The crowd economy is heading towards greater speed, more customization, engagement, authenticity, and monetization, and organizations need to adapt to the rapidly changing environment to manage the risks and reap the benefits of crowdsourcing. However, there are several controversial questions that need to be addressed, such as the lack of a central source of reference around crowdsourcing, the limited understanding among people inside organizations about how crowd collaborations work, the faster adoption of crowdsourcing in the developing world, better ways to manage and curate crowd-based efforts, and the challenges faced by larger companies in investing in the crowd economy.