Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding in the manufacturing and services sectors

Abstract

In the last few years, we have seen the emergence of two new ways in which firms interact with outside stakeholders, namely crowdsourcing and crowdfunding service providers. In this article, we define crowdsourcing and crowdfunding terms, compare new business models with traditional ones, review the operations management research community’s contribution so far, point out useful frameworks for understanding the phenomena, illuminate promising research paths, and highlight open research questions. We also discuss the parallels between these concepts as well the main differences.