| 5. Crowdsourcing research has definitively illustrated that Howe’s ‘‘generally large network of people’’ can include the formation of proprietary inhouse platforms–—such as Dell’s Ideastorm or Starbucks’ My Starbucks Idea–—to form crowds. Crowds may also now be accessed for a fee via crowd platforms like InnoCentive, Kaggle, and CrowdFlower, or through social network platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit (Boudreau & Lakhani, 2013). 6. Crowdsourcing can now be accessed through application programming interfaces (APIs). This generates new affordances for crowdsourcing, both as a standalone process and as a part of other business processes. Clearly, a lot has happened since Howe offered his definition in 2006, and an updated and usable definition of crowdsourcing needs to reflect these trends. It also needs to be broader, rather than more restrictive, to allow for current and future developments of crowdsourcing. In order to recognize the emerging business models built on the continuing prominence of social media and the agency that powerful mobile devices have assumed in our social networks, we can define crowdsourcing as: The use of IT to outsource any organizational function to a strategically defined population of human and non-human actors in the form of an open call. The articles in this special issue are built on this revised definition of crowdsourcing. |