Crowdsourcing, first coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired magazine article, describes the process of gathering groups of people together and using their spare time and untapped knowledge to create something of value. The most prolific use of crowdsourcing today is found in the development of open source software but it has found its way into many other aspects of society. Although crowdsourcing is the dominant phrase describing the practice; related terms include: peer production, wikinomics, crowdcasting, mass collaboration, wisdom of crowds, decision markets, and open source software.

Historical examples date back to the 1714 Longitude Prize , the 1847 Niagara Suspension Bridge contest and development of the Oxford English Dictionary. With the advent of modern computing, crowdsourcing experienced a Renaissance in the form of open source software. People who develop open source projects receive no pay for what they do but they derive satisfaction from the challenges and community of the open source experience. Now organizations outside the software industry are using crowdsourcing as a business practice. Modern day crowdsourcing is made possible by several societal shifts:

• Market demands on innovation force companies to look outside their comfort zone.
• Proliferation of open - collaborative customer, vendor and employee relationships.
• Open source products are challenging proprietary incumbents (Firefox vs. Explorer, IBM joins Linux, Wikipedia vs. Britannica, Amazon & Google open APIs). Creative Commons is now an option to government copyrights ©.
• Presenteesim and the decline of corporate job stability and benefits force talent into the open market.
• Companies willingly cannibalize their value chains to own customer experience. If they don’t someone else will.