Crowdsourcing in wine business: Co-creation and fundraising experiences

The term crowdsourcing is a neologism, coined by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson in 2006, for “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call” (Howe, 2006). Although still in an early stage, thanks to the development and diffusion of Web 2.0 tools and applications, crowdsourcing is leading to a variety of business model in which the “crowd” gets more closely involved in the firms’ activities development, as customers, having the potential to be part of the product design, manufacturing, marketing process, and as investors, directly funding producers and projects, or both. In this context, the aim of this chapter is to achieve a deeper understanding of the opportunities offered by crowdsourcing in wine business. Overall, crowdsourcing might be deployed in marketing activities and represent a new opportunity for small businesses facing difficulties in accessing to bank loans. Given both the novelty of the phenomenon and the exploratory nature of this research, a qualitative multiple-case study approach has been used. For this purpose, cases of successful crowdsourcing experiences in wine business have been identified via an Internet research, and then classified according to their characteristics, with the ultimate purpose of selecting and discuss some cases of major interest as benchmarks.