Crowdsourcing: A Double-Edged Sword Outsourcing Strategy

Nowadays, companies have to increasingly face a lack of internal creative ideas. This has led them to outsource their ideation process through crowdsourcing contests in order to benefit from the creativity of participants on the Internet. Crowdsourcing is a successful outsourcing strategy for companies but includes some limitations that the authors recall in this chapter. Since some authors tend to praise the merits of this new practice, others are suspicious regarding certain aspects of its application. It is in this context that the authors offer a synthetic view on the benefits and risks of creative crowdsourcing. They also offer an analysis of applicable strategies that are commonly used to circumvent major obstacles related to the organization of creative contests and to improve the success of a crowdsourcing campaign. Based on the literature and the results of two qualitative studies, the authors point out the main managerial implications of crowdsourcing initiatives in terms of implementation, benefits, limits and conditions of success.