Guest Editorial: The Age of Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding for Technological Innovation: Where We Are, and Where to Go?

Taking advantage of the combined labor of individual users or even groups of users, organizations can increase the resources to which they have access. Crowdsourcing enables companies to create and capture more value than either the company or the user could do on their own. One of the chief enablers of crowdsourcing's rapid increase is the development and pervasive growth of information and communications technology (ICT), which has led to an explosion of possible crowdsourcing opportunities [1], [20]. Although crowdsourcing has had a significant impact on the practice of management, especially in entrepreneurship [16], there continues to be a multitude of research gaps and, therefore, many openings for future research. Thus, the purpose of this article is to not only introduce our special issue on the topic, but to highlight and summarize some of the research gaps and directions that have the potential to influence the future development of the field of crowdsourcing.