The difference between "co-creation" and "crowdsourcing."

Multidisciplinary collaboration on difficult problems is essential in order to tease apart complex interactions and influences amongst all the stakeholders and problem-owners. The various perspectives on the same problem reveal novel connections that would have otherwise been overlooked. It's essentially a co-designing or co-creation process.

Crowdsourcing portals that seek solvers often encourage team participation. The logistics of making virtual teams work can be alleviated with a myriad of online sharing, thinking and meeting tools. The questions remain, regardless of the team's virtual or real-time presence, how to manage a discovery or insight? How do multiple solvers working together on the same problem move in the same direction in order to develop and articulate this insight? 

My personal experience with "co-creation" typically involves smaller teams (5 or less). The bigger the team the more difficult it is to track ideas and maintain an egalitarian perspective on all of the input. Big teams require expert facilitation. Although many ideas may be tabled, only one can move forward. Lesser solutions or alternatives often confuse the problem-owners and dilute their confidence in the overall "range" of the solutions presented. Crowdsourced solutions, whether or not they are a function of one solver or a team appear to have a natural solidarity with their creators. Crowdsourcing will ideally provide a wide range of ideas from a diverse set of solvers which problem-owners (seekers) will then judge on it's own merits. 

To co-create or crowdsource?

I think the nature of the problem will suggest whether or not it is better to co-create or crowdsource. Co-creation works well in open, monitored forums (e.g. IDEO.org / "amplify challenges") and with smaller dedicated teams convened to work on specific challenges within an organization. Tapping the crowd is more effective for sourcing a large number of novel solutions for very specific problems (e.g. innocentive.com - offering financial incentives for solutions to difficult problem and  governance initiatives that involve large stakeholders groups). In these cases, problem-owners don't interact individually with the participants who share their ideas.

Another important variation on crowdsourcing is akin to getting the pulse of a stakeholder group rather than actually finding actionable solutions. After all, Henry Ford's customers only knew that they wanted to get from A to B to faster.