A Review of Crowdsourcing Literature Related to the Manufacturing Industry

In an increasingly competitive globalised manufacturing environment, the necessity to develop new products and introduce innovative enhancements to existing ranges has created a critical need for the increased utilisation and sharing of organisational and employee knowledge. The capture of this knowledge within industry is of paramount importance as organisations seek to survive and remain competitive. Crowdsourcing, as a collaborative idea generation and problem solving activity, allows employees to capture explicit knowledge from large groups of colleagues and teams, and offers the potential to extract previously unknown tacit knowledge in a less formal virtual environment. This paper provides a review of recently published literature relating to crowdsourcing in the manufacturing industry and offers suggestions for the future direction of crowdsourcing research in manufacturing and product development. 