The Term “Crowdsourcing”

Evan Sohn | June 21, 2019

The term “crowdsourcing” was coined in 2005 by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, editors at Wired, to describe how businesses were using the Internet to “outsource work to the crowd”, which quickly led to the portmanteau “crowdsourcing.” In crowdsourcing, one broadcasts their problem to the public, and an open call for contributions to help solve the problem. Members of the public submit solutions that are then owned by the entity, which originally broadcast the problem.

In Crowdselling the objective is to leverage the crowd to drive sales for a good or a service. While one might say that Amazon is crowdselling goods to the world of consumers, Crowdselling focuses on B2B good and services which have traditionally not had their own unique crowd. In 1994 Amazon identified an opportunity to crowdsell books to consumers cannibalizing traditional book retailers. We believe that marketplaces and platforms can be leveraged to better service the B2B marketplace. Through our selling practice, advisory and agency services we expect to incubate, amplify and launch highly scalable platforms and marketplaces that will change the world of B2B selling.

We welcome you on our journey. Please feel free to send me comments or suggestions at evan@crowdselling.com