Crowdsourcing is an emerging trend in which tasks traditionally performed by internal or professional teams are outsourced to a crowd. The term coined by Wired magazine writer Jeff Howe, owes its genesis to the trend of leveraging the possibilities of mass collaboration brought on by the growth of Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. This emerging trend is worth investigating for a number of business projects.

Why Crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing offers many benefits including cost effectiveness, increased efficiency, collaboration and innovation. For example last year, we wrote about the success of the Threadless T-shirts partnership with Twitter to crowdsource designs for a new line of “Twitter Tees.” For some companies crowdsourcing is becoming a path toward innovation, whereas for others, crowdsourcing ideas may mean saving money on expensive services.

For a bootstrapped entrepreneur, the world of crowdsourcing acts as a new marketplace, where companies can get professional services at a lower cost. For instance, a newly formed business looking to create a new brand logo, website and stationery design can now simply post a design brief on websites such as 99designs, crowdSPRING or DesignCrowd to gather ideas. Similar to a contest, designers from across the world respond to the brief and the best design or idea earns the contract. Among hundreds or even thousands of designs received, the soliciting company has the option to select from the wide range of respondents offering competitive bids, often spending a fraction of the money that would be normally spent for branding and design.

Recently, however, the Gap’s use of crowdsourcing to revamp the company’s logo received strong public backlash. Some experts condemned the idea of asking for designs upfront and companies only paying for what they like. Opponents of crowdsourcing, argue that professionals should be paid for their work and that speculative work can be “disrespectful of the discipline of design, and a devaluation of the profession.”

Given this, when crowdsourcing for design concepts it is important to consider the scope of the project and be considerate about the how much time and free resources you are asking from the community. 

Crowdsourcing the Team

Not restricted solely to ideas, crowdsourcing can also be used to source teams. Businesses faced with fluctuating demand and constant pressure to reduce costs are now hiring on-demand teams for seasonal or specific needs.

A San Francisco-based sporting goods retailer, Lombardi Sports, engaged Cloudcrowd for creating an online catalog for the company site. The Cloudcrowd task force gathered the information needed from manufacturers and other sources and created an online catalog with limited involvement from Lombardi Sports at lower than expected prices.

There are other services that are helping businesses create and maintain websites inexpensively. oDesk and Elance connect qualified technology professionals from around the world with companies who are looking to  create a new tool or software application, or manage day-to-day office tasks. To hire a team, all a company needs do is post a job requirement and select from the appropriate bid based on profiles, experience, ratings, credentials and portfolios.

For many companies crowdsourcing a team is a cost-effective way to off-load trivial tasks. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk allows businesses to outsource small tasks, such as reviewing online content to ensure there is no profanity, verifying the database for accuracy or providing content development such as tagging product images to people over the Internet instead of hiring an in-house workforce.

Crowdsourcing’s collaborative approach is helping companies reduce overhead and increase efficiency. With the abundance and availability of web-community talent and service providers at a fraction of the cost, every business now has access to a world of affordable professionals.

Have you used crowdsourcing for a specific project, to gather ideas or to complete a task? If so post a comment and let us know.