Since Jeff Howe coined the term “Crowdsourcing” in 2006, there has been a lot of buzz about the subject and its promising potential. Despite many examples of crowdsourcing projects – some more successful than others – I have found it very difficult though to apply the concept in my day to day business development activities.

The concept as such is rather straight forward: When you crowdsource a task, you take a job traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsource it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. Leading initiatives have applied crowdsourcing to tasks as solving technology problems, designing new logos, developing (software) products, contributing videos, finding gold, and even predicting the future.

With all these success stories, of course you want to apply crowdsourcing yourself or at least consider it. To start with, I have found it important to understand the difference between:

1. Start-ups using crowdsourcing as their core business model: f.e. YouTube, Threadless…
2. Existing organisations applying crowdsourcing to a specific job: f.e. P&G posting R&D challenges on Innocentive or Goldcorp crowdsourcing the search for gold resources.

So the first step is to define the context. Do you want to use crowdsourcing as a business model for a start-up or new business unit? Or do you want to review specific tasks within an existing organisation (marketing, distribution, R&D challenges…), and redefine the optimal way of performing the task: inhouse, partnership, outsourced, or by crowdsourcing?

More revenue model examples and inspiration:
Posted on March 2, 2009 in Business Model Innovation