Transforming ideas into reality requires not only a vision and passion but that most important of material ingredients – startup capital.

Consider the following statistics, as shared by the SME Chamber of India – Indian SMEs’ contribution to the country’s GDP is estimated to be 17% from 30 million MSME units that create 1.3 million jobs per annum and provide employment to 70 million people.

Crowdsourcing and its cousin, Crowdfunding are the new waves of production and financing in the future, with the ability to provide an affordable solution for SMEs in India and around the world.

Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production process that involves outsourcing tasks to a network of people or ‘the crowd’. This process can occur both online and offline. The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific entity.

In lay terms, crowdsourcing could be defined as: