What is Crowdsourcing?

Crowd-sourcing is defined in the dictionary as “the practice of obtaining information or input into a task or project by enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet”. The concept of Crowdsourcing while remaining the same in essence has changed the way how business is done in today’s world. Penetration of technology to the farthest corners of the world has played a crucial part in this change. With burgeoning population which has access to mobile phones, organisations are using crowdsourcing as a way to access information in a manner which is unprecedented in terms of data and insight. And don’t be mistaken, crowd-sourcing just doesn’t imply information, it has also been used to source funds and Kickstarter is probably the best example of this initiative. More than $ 3.5 Billion has been raised for funding approximately 140,000 projects since the inception of Kickstarter in 2009.

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Digital Platforms leveraging Crowdsourcing

Leaving aside the debate on whether Wikipedia can be considered as a successful crowdsourcing platform or a failed one when it comes to authenticity, we all can agree that it has laid out a template for the rest of the world to follow on how to leverage information from the general population. More recently, Google has been at the forefront of using crowdsourcing to target users with focused advertisements and helps people make more
informed decisions. Waze is another great example of crowdsourcing as it enables users to report traffic jams and then gives out the direction to the best route. In this era where digital platforms such as Amazon, Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, etc. are taking over traditional businesses, its pertinent for these businesses to transform themselves or face the danger of being phased out in the coming few years. Airbnb, which crowdsources houses across the world from users and rents them out to travelers and in return gives a part of the earning to the owners. This helps in increasing the network effect as it allows all the stakeholders to benefit from the arrangement. One common thread between these platforms is they ensure all the stakeholders who use the ecosystem are benefitting from it, either by saving or earning money or getting quality goods and content from parts of the world which was unimaginable 5 years ago.

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Future of Crowdsourcing

Initially, I was an avid participant on Google Maps, where I shared reviews and pictures about the places I had visited, but at the end of the day, I did not see any tangible benefits for me and now I hardly contribute to the platform. I believe that for platforms to grow, every stakeholder who participates in an interaction must be rewarded. Until and unless people are not incentivized, they will stop sharing information after a period of time and the only way to make them continue is to share with them a piece of the pie.