This book disrupts the way practitioners and academic scholars think about crowds, crowdsourcing, innovation, and new organizational forms in this emerging period of ubiquitous access to the internet. The authors argue that the current approach to crowdsourcing unnecessarily limits the crowd to offering ideas, locking out those of us with knowledge about a problem. They use data from 25 case studies of flash crowds - anonymous strangers answering online announcements to participate in a 7-10 day innovation challenge - half of whom were unleashed from the limitations of focusing on ideas. Yet, these crowds were able to develop new business models, new product lines, and offer useful solutions to global problems in fields as diverse as health care insurance, software development, and societal change. This book, which offers a theory of collective production of innovative solutions explaining the practices that the crowds organically followed, will revolutionize current assumptions about how innovation and crowdsourcing should be managed for commercial as well as societal purposes.

1. What is Crowdsourcing for Innovation?

2. Our Research on Comparing Idea Sharing
3. Practice #1: Minimally Committed Knowledge Baton Passers
4. Practice #2: Crowds Offering a Variety of Types of Knowledge Are More Innovative Than Crowds Suggesting More Ideas
5. Practice #3: Amplify Creative Associations of Knowledge       Fragments
6. Practice #4: Reconstructing Needs for Creative Associations
7. Practice #5: Allowing the Crowd to Play Any Innovation-Enabling They Choose
8. Tying it All Together: A Theory of Collective Production of Innovation to Inspire Future Research
9. Designing Technology Platforms for Collective Co-Production: Advice When Selecting Crowdsourcing Platforms
10. Unleashing the Crowd: Overcoming the Managerial Challenges
11. Final Words: What's the Future: Managing Organizations as Crowds Enabled by Super-Connectivity and Big Data.