Crowdsourcing and Outsourcing: Friends or Foes?

Crowdsourcing and outsourcing are alternative ways for performing business activities by companies. The purpose of this paper is to explore what type of marketing activities are nowadays outsourced and crowdsourced by enterprises and which is the best way to do it. We used an Internet mediated research approach and analyzed the content of 40 websites – 20 crowdsourcing platforms and 20 outsourcing companys’ websites - to understand what activities are crowdsourced and outsources and how success is defined in both cases. Our results indicate that while crowdsourcing is used to perform specific and more tactical activities, outsourcing is used for more complex and strategic processes. In addition, crowdsourcing is focusing on quality and finding the best solutions while outsourcing is emphasizing optimization, lower costs and relationships. From a managerial perspective, this does not mean that one excludes the other, but that it can complement each other.