Crowdsourcing - call for users to innovate

Today, crowdsourcing is a concept commonly used by major companies in the new technologies sector, and has developed rapidly thanks to the networking of Internet users. The literal translation of crowdsourcing is "sourcing from the crowd", but the preferred translation today is "open outsourcing". The idea behind this field of knowledge management is to harness the know-how, or at least the working capacity, of a large number of people, often via the Internet, to outsource a task. Each Internet user can thus freely contribute to this task in a collaborative or parallel way, and more or less consciously. Numerous sites have put these ideas into practice in fields as varied as T-shirt design, financial markets or software development. The development of smartphones has even enabled leading mobile operating system providers to build up geolocated databases without the user's knowledge.

The use of crowdsourcing has a number of advantages that have made some of the sites that use it so successful. In the execution of tedious tasks, it offers the possibility of breaking down work into small units, using a very large number of contributors, for a result equivalent to the work of hundreds of employees. Applied to the field of innovation, it is a means of gathering ideas and opinions from a crowd that is a priori more relevant than a small number of decision-makers, provided that the collaboration of contributing members is well organized. Crowdsourcing can even help you find the inventor of genius who will find the right solution to a problem. Addressing a large number of people multiplies the chances of finding the right creative expert. Applied to the design of new products, crowdsourcing directly integrates the opinions of consumers, involving them in the creation of the product and thus promising immediate sales and commercial success.

Despite the economic relevance of the model, controversy surrounds the unfair competition that crowdsourcing brings to traditional salaried work. In addition, the intellectual property issues associated with this approach need to be carefully addressed.