Crowd Source- The Big Inexhaustible Organization Resource

Abstract

In this paper, online jewellery store Bluestone.com had secured $5mn funding from Accel Partners and Meena Ganesh, CEO& MD of Pearson Education Services in June 2013. Crowd sourcing a.k.a. crowd funding has been the key word in business communities predominantly today especially in technological innovations. Both-crowd sourcing and crowd funding meet the cost benefits analysis of any CFO- in all sense. Crowd sourcing is a way of innovation at no cost by people who are not employees but work for the company and Crowd funding-an avenue for low cost capital. Volume meets the value concept explained. Crowd sourcing as a phenomenon is an old concept but widely gaining popularity today. Wikipedia in its current form today owes its success to millions of online contributors for has worked for a common good. Today it is a popular tool for students, journalist world over thanks to this phenomenon. Crowd sourcing has been distinguished as an effective means of open innovation for collecting creative ideas from people who have various degrees of expertise and diversity in knowledge. There are several more benefits expected from the use of crowd sourcing. Crowd sourcing is an effective marketing activity in itself because it is a method of communicating with customers and making customers feel valued (Yoo, Lee, & Choi, 2013) . This paper examines and investigates the idea of crowd sourcing as a resource that an organization uses for not only its research and development activities but also for funding, as labour force, a no-cost resource that the organization is not investing upon in any way but reaping benefits from an investment in a non-investment resource. The organization is effectively is reaping on Maslow’s theory benefits and at the same time also a means for marketing communication.