Crowdsourcing – what it is, works and why it involves so many people?

Crowdsourcing is a recent concept, very popular in companies’ practice and literature. In literature there are many definitions of this concept, but some of them are inconsistent and incomplete. In this paper, existing definitions of crowdsourcing are analyzed to extract common elements and to establish the basic characteristics of any crowdsourcing initiative. Based on these existing definitions, an exhaustive and consistent definition for crowdsourcing is presented and contrasted in thirty two cases.