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The purpose of this chapter was to deconstruct the underlying contradictions of crowdfunding practices and to show how crowdfunding practitioners develop a schizophrenic use of these contradictions.

The main contradictions of crowdfunding practices are introduced with theoretical references. Then short cases are used to illustrate how crowdfunding practitioners try to cope with these contradictions.

The crowd addresses many contradictions, first because it is a syncretic concept, second because online crowds are still to be proven crowds. In any case, crowdfunding practitioners do their best to take the advantage of these contradictions, and run the risk of falling between two stools.

An attempt to provide an analysis of crowdfunding as a social, and not only economic, phenomenon, to suggest avenues for further critical research on crowdfunding.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to explore the orientations of consumer and company participants who participate in online crowd-sourced communities.

Methodology/Approach – Using a netnographic approach, we analysed the Nokia Design by Community (NDbC) crowd-sourced information contest, which was organised by Nokia in order to co-create a vision of the community's ‘dream’ Nokia device.

Findings – The findings reveal that community members' social orientations were dramatically different from the host organisation's narrow commercial focus, which led to unresolved tensions and as we posit, the ultimate failure of the initiative.

Research implications – The contemporary discourse on collaborative value co-creation potentially overemphasises the commercial objectives of organisations by failing to acknowledge the need for organisations to address the complex communal objectives and motivations of members of crowd-sourced communities.

Practical implications – Organisations need to acknowledge and address the complex and dynamic communal and commercial tensions that inherently emerge in online crowd-sourced communities. They need to adopt a tribal marketing approach and respectfully engage with community members if the diverse objectives of community members and the host organisations are to be satisfactorily met.

Originality/Value – Organisations and researchers need to recognise and acknowledge that crowdsourcing both begets communal conflict and fosters collaborative behaviour due to contested commercial and social orientations. While mindful of their commercial objectives, organisations will succeed in implementing online crowd-sourcing initiatives if they make a sincere effort to understand and respect the diversity, culture and social norms of the particular crowd-sourced online community concerned.

Introduction – In the twenty-first century, which is the age of communication and information, the time and space concepts have changed with new media technologies and changes have occurred in habits and ways of doing business using the Internet. In this respect, crowdsourcing concept comes first among the new applications with which internet users can share content. The crowdsourcing, which may be understood as ‘mass-based work’ or ‘crowded resource’, consists of a combination of ‘crowd’ and ‘source’, and refers to the use of a great number of human societies to do a common work. The crowdsourcing concept, used commonly as of the 2000s for different purposes, is included in the literature as a concept showing the power of crowds. It is a method in which communication and internet technologies are used with efficacy in the advertising and marketing fields.

Purpose – The objective of the present study is to determine the pros and cons of the crowdsourcing concept through new media applications in the form of critical evaluations by examining sample case studies that use the crowdsourcing concept, which is becoming widespread in Turkey and in the whole world in recent years.

Methodology – In this study, the ‘Case (Sample Event) Study Analysis’, which is one of the qualitative research methods and which is a methodological approach that includes examining how the crowdsourcing system works in-depth, will be used.

Findings – Crowdsourcing is becoming a worldwide business model and allows anyone with free time and an internet connection to contribute to economic productivity. This study has discussed the importance of crowdsourcing for companies in contextual terms and has made predictions on how to make this concept become a better model in which fields.

Purpose: The insurance business is confronted with coordination difficulties that necessitate a high level of mobility, flexibility, and the capacity to analyse heterogeneous, location-dependent data from different sources and qualities. Recent innovations in emerging technologies have given the insurance industry new organisational options. When coupled with data analytics, crowdsourcing in the insurance industry facilitates solving complex issues with the wisdom of crowds. The notion of incorporating crowdsourcing and big data into the mainstream activities of insurance management is developed in this article, as are the ramifications and gains of collective intelligence achieved by Crowdsourcing and the added value of crowdsourcing insurance activities.

Design/methodology/approach: This chapter is a conceptual work that builds on relevant literature.

Findings: This chapter analyses what insurance industry managers should consider when coordinating crowdsourced activities and how they may benefit from collective intelligence combined with data analytics in terms of efficient and real-time response management for the insurance industry. Furthermore, it is demonstrated how they may use crowdsourcing to exploit information and benefit from invoking additional resources and eliminating the institutional voids present in the industry.

Practical implications: Exemplary applications that take advantage of crowdsourcing and data analytics would help the insurance sector respond flexibly, efficiently, and effectively in real time.

Originality/value: This chapter offers new collaborative ways to enhance the decision-making of insurance industry managers. The relevance of overcoming institutional voids is expanded, and repercussions from the given framework are suggested using data analytics.

In his inauguration speech of 1961, John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic and youngest-ever holder of the office of US President, famously exhorted citizens to ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.’ At the time, few would have interpreted this as a call for open innovation or even citizen crowdsourcing: neither the language nor the architecture then existed for either. But the sentiment he expressed marked the beginning of a campaign of citizen engagement in developing ideas for government. It was, in effect, the first national exhortation for the crowdsourcing of ideas, and Kennedy’s words have subsequently been adapted by Jeff Howe for the modern crowdsourcing context.

Citizen crowdsourcing is now well-established. This chapter sets out to assess how successful it has been as a mechanism for finessing original and meaningful ideas that advance social goals. We look briefly at leading examples of crowdsourcing for social good. We also look at the underlying factors that support it, including the knowledge and input solicited from the crowd; the crowd’s willingness to participate; and the mechanisms through which the crowd can engage. We trace the idea and practice of crowdsourcing back to Socrates in ancient Athens. We look at prosocial behaviour, exploring selected annals of public intellectuals, including Emerson. We examine citizen science as a forerunner of crowdsourcing, then move into the business strategy of open innovation and, finally, we arrive at crowdsourcing for social good in various guises. In conclusion, we explore what has been learned from initiatives that can now be considered current best practice in this area.

The aim of this chapter is to present techniques to involve the crowd in the ideation and funding process of tourism ventures. The typologies of those techniques are presented before analysing their key success factors and advantages. Finally, a design model is presented in order to help managers and project holders to implement a crowd ideation and funding process.

Literature review, quantitative and qualitative methods such as data analysis and interviews were employed to encompass several aspects of crowdsourcing related to tourism ventures.

This chapter highlights the key success factors and advantages of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding for tourism ventures, formulates recommendations and proposes a concrete tool for every project holder or manager who would like to engage in those activities.

Although several types of crowdsourcing are operative, we only focused on two particular types that are interesting for tourism entrepreneurs.

The key success factors and key advantages presented in this chapter constitute tracks for reflection and for action for the managers and project holders. The crowdsourcing design model is a tool to help entrepreneurs to elaborate campaigns of crowdsourcing/crowdfunding.

This chapter summarises the evolution of involving the crowd in the innovation and funding process of a project. The reasons and success factors are exposed and illustrated with numerous examples from the tourism industry. Finally, a practical model is presented in order to allow the creation of a crowdsourcing/crowdfunding campaign.

Geotechnologies have a long tradition in several areas of society and research. The recent development of the ‘Internet of Everything’ (IoE) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies opened several doors to the contribution of tourism. Emergent technologies contributions to tourism and planning such as web mapping, augmented reality (AR), crowdsourcing and crowdsensing are relatively recent, and there is a lack of research around their potential for Creative Tourism enhancement. For example, combining web mapping with AR or storytelling can be an excellent contribution to operators, planners and tourists. For research purposes, new opportunities are open, particularly by integrating community-shared data. It is well known for the popularity of social networks, the exponential growth of photo sharing, but few studies have been implemented to understand their contribution to research. This chapter focuses on emerging geotechnologies concerning cultural mapping, Creative Tourism and sustainability. Since it is a new growing niche, more research is needed to develop and understand the potential of new approaches. Besides traditional techniques such as quantitative (e.g. surveys) and qualitative ones (e.g. interviews, focus groups and world café), it revises the role of geotechnologies on Creative Tourism development and growing activities. Results from case studies from Europe are analysed.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how social media features enable crowdsourcing and to gain rich understanding of mechanisms that lead from online community design practices to success in crowdsourcing initiatives.

Inductive qualitative methods were used for investigating the case of crowdsourcing-based microstock business model. Twenty-three in-depth interviews with stock photography industry insiders were combined with netnography data and documents.

Two mechanisms influencing participants’ motivation and peer-to-peer learning were identified. Both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are important for participants’ engagement.

Findings of this inductive effort should be replicated in other industry settings and used to develop testable propositions of antecedents and outcomes of crowdsourcing implementations.

Companies embarking on crowdsourcing initiatives can enhance participants’ motivations through social media and enable learning through online communities. Managers must understand who participates in the crowd and what their motivation is.

This study is investigating under-researched peer-vetted creative production crowdsourcing model. Managers can use presented ideas for developing crowdsourcing online communities.