Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is process of involving or engaging experts from large population to explore knowledge, goods or services with the intent of solving problems, leveraging innovation and efficiency. Furthermore, it is an outsourcing of work to a large people around the world. And it mainly works by distributing labor, idea, goods and services among many people in the form of micro-tasks. Crowdsourcing can take place on various levels and across many industries.

Some benefits of crowdsourcing include the following:

• Faster problem solving
• Large marketplace
• Reduce management burden
• Greater diversity of thinking and ideas
• Identify and solve complex problems
• Receiving quick feedback
• Reduce overall cost

The differences between crowdsourcing, outsourcing and insourcing is briefly discussed as follows:

• Crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining service, information or feedback into a project by considering the potential of a large number of number of pain or unpaid people through the Internet. Moreover, it involves obtaining information, work or input from undefined and generally large population in the form of an open call or bid. Unlike outsourcing, which is done by a specific service provider, crowdsourcing is targeted at obtaining services from a crowd of people capable of delivering tasks or achieving goals. It is the practice of outsourcing tasks to a group of people instead of targeted provider, which is the case in outsourcing strategy.
• Outsourcing: Outsourcing is a practice of undertaking tasks, services or job functions by specifying the help of a third party provider in a given industry. Moreover, outsourcing is a contractual agreement based practice that involves one pays another to perform services and deliver it to the company according to the agreement. Furthermore, it is the business strategy of hiring a third party provider to perform business processes of an organization.
• Insourcing: Insourcing is a practice of business strategy in which job functions or work that would otherwise have been contracted to a provider is performed internally by staff members of an organization, instead of crowdsourcing or outsourcing it.