Customersourcing: to Pay or be Paid

Customersourcing is a newly coined term representing the on-line version of an older practice, and a defining a sub-category of the now popular Crowdsourcing practice. This article starts with a brief overview of Crowdsourcing and its various subcategories such as Crowdfunding, and Crowdvoting. Further, the conceptual development of the Customersourcing Model is discussed in which a ‘community of customers’ become the ‘suppliers’ from which a business draws resources such as input to their value chain activities. Finally, a financial framework for categorizing a spectrum of financial models is developed for Customersourcing, including appropriate examples.