What is Crowdsourcing?

“Utilising a network of customers or other partners to gain insights for new product or process innovations and to potentially help promote a brand“.

Great example of by penguin for the development of Spinebreakers, a new proposition for teenagers.

“During the website development Penguin recruited hundreds of teenagers from every area and background for focus groups and usability testing. The teenagers made every decision, choosing the URL and the nature of the brand themselves. “We decided not to make any assumptions,” says Rafferty. The site is now run by three tiers of teenagers, or “crews” as they elected to be called, who have varying levels of control over the site“.

and running the site:

“The core crew of 12 teenagers write all of the website copy and come into the Penguin offices every month to discuss strategy; the second crew of 70 deputy editors are based all over the country and have back‑end access to the site; while the third tier consists of the hundreds of teenaged bloggers who participate on the site“.