Crowdsourcing
For your midterm, you are to write an abstract on crowdsourcing.
Background: Today it is not unusual to see entrepreneurs rely on the crowd to seek financial assistance to support their business idea instead of going to a traditional financial investor, bank or seek venture capital. The entrepreneur uses his or her social networks and established platforms on the Internet to directly interact with the crowd. The term crowdsourcing was first introduced in 2005 by Howe and Robinson, editors at Wired, however, it is in recent years this form of funding has taken off. In 2013, crowd funding became a $5.1 billion industry and in 2014 the market grew to $16.2 billion and it is expected to exceed $34.4 billion by the end of 2015. In China alone, the crowd funding industry is expected to reach $50 billion by 2025. We are looking at a potential global crowd funding market of $90-96 billion by 2025.
As the Internet becomes more integrated into all of our lives, driven in large part through mobile and social, we will all become increasingly interconnected. Our new interconnected world will contain multiple networks that represent different dimensions of people's lives - social (Facebook), business (LinkedIn), food (Allrecipes), wine (Vivino), travel (TripAdvisor), movies (Netflix), fitness (Runtastic) - and cross the digital-physical divide (The Internet of Things). Crowdsourcing sites like G2 Crowd will represent just one more type of network that will connect people with products and technology, telling you what products they used, what they thought of them, and what reviews they read, liked or shared. If you then link the crowdsourcing network to a business network like LinkedIn, you can connect companies to reviewers and bring with it lots of context that when comprehensively analyzed can transform your understanding of the reviews.
Guidelines: A submission link will be provided on the course website.
- Deadlines: October 20, 2015
- Length of text: 2-3 pages
- Formatting: Single spaced, Font 12, Times New Roman
- References: 10-15
Keywords: crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, crowd wisdom, crowd creation, crowd voting, crowdfunding models, SWOT.
References
References should be listed in alphabetical order, with a link to the article. Below is an example.
Breen, F. (2015). Funding offer lucrative leg-up for entrepreneurs. Retrieved September 21, 2015 from
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-03/entrepreneurs turn-from-bank-loans-to-internet-crowd-funding/6747286