Crowdsourcing:

On the company level, taking a job traditionally performed by an employee and outsourcing it to the world at large via open invitation on the Internet.

At a glance, you could confuse crowdsourcing with crowd sorcery. They aren’t that far apart, as it is the magic created by the intelligence of “the crowd”--that is, the entire human population, that makes crowdsourcing a potent source of innovation for business today. If you have a problem you can’t solve in-house, just ask the crowd to do it for you. When the crowd responds, you’ve crowdsourced. Why didn’t we think of that before? As always these days, the answer can be summed up in a word: Internet.

Coined by Harvard Fellow and Contributing Editor at Wired, Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing is as simple and yet revolutionary as open source software, Wikipedia or eBay. Indeed, it is the open-sourcing of all of human endeavor, including business.