April 25, 2013, 4:08 PM — If two heads are better than one, are 45,000 heads spectacular? That's the promise of crowdsourcing. Companies can find new ideas faster and sometimes at a lower cost than internal innovation.
[Related: Crowdsourcing Offers a Tightly Focused Alternative to Outsourcing]
But putting business problems out for public brainwork could expose sensitive information and strategic plans. And contest-winning ideas, developed in isolated laboratory conditions with squeaky-clean data, can't always be translated to the unpredictable real world, says Anand Rao, a principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
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