Introduction

Crowdsourcing has been around in some form or the other for sometime now. Its first big wave arrived with a rise in internet start-ups looking to access a large pool of low-cost labor over the web. In what we potentially see as a second inflexion point, large corporations in recession-hit economies are willing to experiment with crowdsourcing in three ways: a) as a model to support new areas such as content localization, translation, and advertising b) as an alternative to traditional BPO models with high fixed costs for insourced and outsourced processes and c) as an option to access globally distributed talent quicker and priced lower than other sourcing models.

Some large corporations currently use crowdsourcing for low-end tasks while few others are beginning to leverage the crowd for project-based jobs. Whether crowdsourcing can gain a foothold as a proven sourcing model in a wider enterprise community depends on how it incrementally ups its benefits and overcomes its challenges. This viewpoint outlines some of these benefits and challenges that will determine the future of crowdsourcing.