Crowd Sourcing

The term crowd sourcing is originated from an article of Jeff Howe in 2006 in wired magazine. He described crowd sourcing as "the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call."

That means crowd sourcing is a procedure to use the power of crowd. So it is very powerful because always two heads are better than a single one and similarly the heads of a mass of people are better than a few.

Previously a task, which was done the employees of a company or the company outsourced it, is now performed by a mass of people. In this process the no. of people doing the job increases but the cost required to perform the job decreases. A company always wants to obtain new innovative ideas for its business model using minimum cost. The phenomenon crowd sourcing allows the companies to utilize the power of the people at cheapest price.

This phenomenon crowd sourcing is often used as a contest hosted by companies to award people who wins a challenge given by the company(http://www.philoptima.org/crowd-sourcing-expert/ ). In this process the final award winner will be a single person but a company can get many innovative ideas from it without any expense.

The main advantage from it is the host has a large no. of options to choose from it. Suppose if a company wants to crowd source the solution of a scientific problem even though a single best solution will win the challenge but from the other entries the company may get one or more ideas to solve other problems.

This method also has some disadvantages. The main problem is that if the crowdsourcee participates in more than one contest and submits the same solution to all the contests and if more than one host choose his/her solution then the host who wants to use the solution later will not be able to use it