First i would like to apologize, I have been slacking lately on these blog posts.
"Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The
act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth."-Peter Drucker
This week in my readings a came across the very interesting subject: Crowdsourcing. Prior to this week I had never really heard of this whole idea of crowdsourcing. What is it, how did it come to fruition, and aren't these two words were all questions that I had started with. As i soon came to find out: crowdsourcing is a neologistic compound of Crowd and a short for Outsourcing, for the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor,
and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions (wikipedia.org/wiki/crowdsourcing). In other words crowdsourcing is the idea that tasks once performed by a company internally can now be "outsourced" to the crowd, which is more or less the general public.
With the internet now in its golden age, social networking, information, and connectivity have become a focal point for businesses. This idea of crowdsourcing is new unique, and wile i may not be 100% convinced it still seems to make a large amount of sense. As each day passes, technology get ever more influential, prominent, and advanced. Today alone I can name many computer programs that have taken the place of their human counterparts. I can find a program that does my tax return, will pay my bills, and will even teach me another language.
Now while this might not be crowdsourcing, it has, however, increased the prominence and idea of crowdsourcing. Computer programs like these allow for the average joe to do things that he/she would normally have to hire some one to do. What does this mean? People in todays world no longer have to be professionals. Instead all they have to do is....Learn a program. Take accounting for example. This is a profession that as everything to do with numbers, but there is one problem, humans make mistakes. So what do we do? We flawed humans that make mistakes, make programs to run on computers that NEVER make mistakes. Today, most of, if not all, accountants have digital ledgers and financial books to keep track of their businesses financial positions. One of the largest programs used by accountants is excel.
Lets take this just one step further. if i am a small business entrepreneur, my one goal is to limit my expenses. Now with this idea of crowdsourcing, instead of hiring an accountant, I can go to someone i know, or myself and use the various programs at my fingertips to complete a job that would have otherwise required a professional. This is just one way that crowdsourcing can work and it looks to be very promising in the future. Peter Drucker said "The purpose of a business is to create a customer", so who better to innovate a corporation than its customers?
