On the New Florence blog, I have tracked the steady growth of crowdsourcing. For the longest time it was about bite size tasks which could be sourced through Amazon Mechanical Turk or contractor sites like eLance.
But you can see the complexity of projects and the range of services keeps growing
Flight operations optimization at Alaska Airlines
Hubs like Zipments for courier services, Instacart for grocery shopping and Homejoy for home cleaning
As we have seen in previous disruptions to labor markets, incumbent models don’t just give up easily. Just like employees tried to sabotage outsourcing attempts, expect to see the equivalent of Parisian taxi drivers protesting the Uber model, but crowdsourcing is clearly moving up the value chain.
