The term Crowdsourcing was coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe. But it’s roots go way back.

Its early beginnings are collectives. Particularly the artist collective which was a way for a bunch of folk to get together and succeed better as a group than as individuals. Hey, it worked for the impressionists. Art is a complex creative process – and one that benefits from informal group think. That is why even today artists huddle in studio clusters. Often, only when an artist becomes more established do they break off and set up their own, independent studio.

It is this same group think that created the Open-source software movement. A lead developer kicks a project off, writes the core code or Kernel, then other volunteers join the mission and add, amend and improve code. These open source volunteers have produced software that in the last decade has challenged many of the most established players and sectors.

Group think, hobbyist passion and the collective mission motivated teams of software developers from all over the world to unite across the Web and take on the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. The David’s versus the Goliath’s.

With the development of Web communities and marketplaces starting early 2,000 it became clear that the open source way of working and the collective style group think could help other projects. First up Wikipedia. An encyclopedia purely developed by the volunteer crowd – openly curated by Wikipedia’s organizers. Now it’s pretty much the most used encyclopedia on the planet.

Web community has morphed into Web collective – Crowdsourcing to further wider causes while also benefitting the individual inputter. What next?

Well, pretty much anything that benefits from group think, Web organisation, mission driven community and a shortening of the chain between producer and user. First up expect Crowdsourcing to improve the way in which the creative industries operate and output, then the professional services industries, then how ideas are developed and started up – right out to how businesses and government function.

Crowdsourcing works. It removes unnecessary cost and waste, shorten’s work cycles, obliterates bloat and flattens hierarchy. It stimulates innovation and done right it even distributes wealth better than the current system. It could prove to be the most important economic game changer since the industrial revolution. Let’s see.