Crowdsourcing: A Model for Leveraging Online Communities

Abstract

As our understanding of participatory cultures advances, there is a growing interest among practitioners and scholars in how best to take charge of the creative, productive capabilities of Internet users for specific purposes. A number ofonline businesses in the past decade have actively recruited individuals in online communities to design products and solve problems for them, often motivating an online community's creative output or harnessing their creative input through the format of an open challenge with various rewards.