On Anita Campbell’s excellent Small Business Trends blog, a recent post from guest author Amit Mullerpattan was entitled Top 10 Outsourcing Trends.  Amit is an outsourcing pro and his analysis list interesting to me as a frequent user of outsourcing services.

The article however missed a HUGE trend in outsourcing, one that we have been making great use of here at TransFS – Crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing as defined by Wikipedia is:

The act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design^[1] and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).

Basically you publish the specs of whatever it is that you need to get done ( design, code,research, etc.) and a large group of people compete to come up with the best answer.  In our use of crowdsourcing we have seen almost unbelievable results, and we will write more on this topic over the next few weeks.

Despite the learning curve, crowdsourcing should be part of every businessperson’s toolbox because it is so efficient. Crowdsourcing is absolutely a big part of the future of outsourcing.