Crowd-Based Entrepreneurship

The crowd-based enterprise tends to solve, explore, understand, and listen to people on a whole new functionality of firms through the technology platforms to acquire and analyze collective (crowdsourced) opinions on a greater scale. Indeed, the increasing use of information markets, wikis, crowdsourcing, the wisdom of crowd concepts, social networks, collaborative software, and other Web-based tools constitute a paradigm shift for companies in making customer-centric decisions. Consequently, this chapter discusses crowd sourcing, open innovation, new product management, niche marketing, and decision-making perspectives of entrepreneurship. The attributes of crowd-based business models include integration of contributors from outside the traditional boundaries of a firm, data mining through digital peer-to-peer platforms, and the transfer of value creating activities to a crowd. This chapter discusses the evolution of crowd-based business modeling and its prospects with firms operating in emerging markets in the context of crowd-engagement in businesses.