Risk Management in Crowdsourcing-Based Business Ecosystems

Crowdsourcing has emerged as a new approach to innovation that leverages the potential of the “collective brain” to broaden the scope of open RD tinyurl.com/lej7dkm). As originally defined, it is "the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call" (Howe, 2006a; tinyurl.com/ yfwtk2d). In order to build a foundation to both create and capture value equitably from a crowd, companies need to understand the elements of crowdsourcing and define their business models accordingly.