Crowdsourcing: Activities, incentives and users' motivations to participate

Advent of Internet provides growing features for the companies to engage users in online platforms where users share, design, and innovate different ideas. Crowdsourcing is an emerging phenomenon used to get benefits through these online community members who are unknown to companies in general. Crowdsourcing is crucial for the companies to identify consumers' needs and to solve these felt needs. The objective of this study was to explore the key activities performed through crowdsourcing, the incentives structure, geographical origins of platforms. This explorative study reveals the overall view of incentives structure in various online platforms. Collecting and analyzing information from over 400 online platforms, this study provides a phenomenal perspective in global context focusing particularly on prevalent activities, companies' incentives and geographical location etc. in relation with online crowdsourcing platforms.