Crowdsourcing has made quite a way since Howe coined the term back in 2006. His definition is still the most prominent today.
"Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents 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. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers." (Howe, Jeff (June 2, 2006). "Crowdsourcing: A Definition". Crowdsourcing Blog. Retrieved July 25th, 2013.)
Of course, also before the term was born, there have always been division of labor activities that one could subsume under the word crowdsourcing, but since then and especially with the emergence of what is called web 2.0 many more applications or possibilites for crowdsourcing have emerged.
Further categorization has even been established. Today we know of opensourcing, crowdinnovation, crowdfunding, crowdinvesting, microtasks, crowdvoting and many more.
All have in common, that an open call (in some cases the openness is restricted to certain groups or participants) is put in place to accomplish some kind of goal with a wide range of reasons behind it.
Opensourcing as described by Agerfalk and Fitzgerald (Agerfalk, P., Fitzgerald, B.: Outsourcing to an Unknown Workforce: Exploring Opensourcing as a Global Sourcing Strategy. In: Management Information Systems Quarterly 32 (2008) 2, pp. 385-409) is the collaboration of commercial companies and open source communities on development of software of commercial interest to the company. BTW it’s a very interesting article delving into the reasons for participation in such projects on the side of the open source community. A good example of opensourcing are the various Linux distributions.
Crowdinnovation refers to the use of the crowd, mostly in a collaborative effort, in order to explore new business models, product designs, entire products, or other things of that nature. Examples would be Dell IdeaStorm or Tchibo Ideas. Cisco too made use of the crowd to explore new business opportunities that would be in keeping with their expertise and experience but would allow them to expand their business.
Microtasks are small, individual tasks that are quite easily handled by a human that a machine could only complete with a large effort or could not complete at all like audio transcriptions, editing, or research tasks. As a microtask platform, Amazon’s mechanical turk is probably the most prominent.
Crowdfunding is, according to Prive, “the practive of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet." (Prive, T.: What Is Crowdfunding And How Does It Benefit The Economy. On: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyaprive/2012/11/27/what-is-crowdfunding-and-how-does-it-benefit-the-economy/. retrieved July 25th, 2013.)
Crowdinvesting is quite similar to crowdfunding, but while the former mostly applies to creative projects and usually offers no or only symbolic returns, the latter is intended to finance a company or a project in return for a portion of the earnings of the company. The investment can take the form of an equity stake or debt.
Finally there are many more means of crowdsourcing efforts. Crowdvoting would be one example. Another would be using the Internet to place the call, while completion occurs offline in the real world as is the case with TaskRabbit.
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