The rise and fall of crowdsourcing?

Crowdsourcing has been discussed both in academic and managerial articles in recent years. Despite some critical voices, the overall attitude towards crowdsourcing has been quite positive in extant literature. In this paper we want to address potential drawbacks and issue that create shadows on top of crowdsourcing. The overall purpose of this paper is to discuss the reasons why crowdsourcing initiatives may not always live up to the expectations placed upon them. Despite some seemingly successful case examples, not every crowdsourcing initiative has taken off. While some of the barriers are case or industry specific, there are also certain overall reasons hindering crowdsourcing from reaching de facto modus operandi, especially in the innovation creation context. This paper is intentionally written through a critical lens by design and hopefully provides a constructive balance for those with an overly positive approach towards crowdsourcing.