The Rise and Fall of Crowdsourcing?

Crowd sourcing has been discussed both in academic and managerial articles in recent years. Despite some critical voices, the overall attitude towards crowd sourcing has been quite positive in extant literature. In this paper we want to address potential drawbacks and issue that create shadows on top of crowd sourcing. The overall purpose of this paper is to discuss the reasons why crowd sourcing initiatives may not always live up to the expectations placed upon them. Despite some seemingly successful case examples, not every crowd sourcing initiative has taken off. While some of the barriers are case or industry specific, there are also certain overall reasons hindering crowd sourcing from reaching de facto modus operandi, especially in the innovation creation context. This paper is intentionally written through a critical lens by design and hopefully provides a constructive balance for those with an overly positive approach towards crowd sourcing.