Should your company 'crowdsource' its next project?

Another less quantifiable advantage, Allred says, is code quality. "Clearly some of the people doing this are top guns who bang C# 18 hours a day, seven days a week," he says. "Even our top developers have to sometimes say, 'Wow.'"

And because the programmers are global, Allred is also finding their perspectives to differ from those of U.S. developers. "The creativity and innovation of how people are rationalizing these designs and building components enables us to interject a perspective and approach that normally we wouldn't have access to," he says.

Crowd control

Of course, crowdsourcing is not all upside. For one thing, Edwards says, you can't allow the inmates to run the asylum when soliciting customer opinions as Dell is doing. "When you open the floodgates, anyone can hop on there and talk about anything," he says. "There may be people who don't like the brand or are unhappy with the stock performance."

To get around that, he says, it's a good idea to focus the discussion around one area and clearly define what you're trying to achieve and what the community is all about. "The dialogue you get will only be as intelligent as the wisdom of the crowd," he says.

Another idea, he says, is to create a private community, which you can do through platforms from companies such as Think Passenger Inc. and Leverage Software. According to Edwards, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Salesforce.com Inc. are using Leverage Software to create private social networks for customer, partner and developer relationship-building and have threaded discussion and poll functionality for information-gathering.

Other crowdsourcing models limit audience participation by natural selection. People who join InnoCentive Inc.'s "open innovation marketplace," for instance, tend to be scientists, engineers, inventors and business experts because they're called upon to respond to highly complex challenges posted by organizations, or "seekers."

If an InnoCentive participant's idea is selected, he can be rewarded up to $100,000 for it. "It's not your average crowd," Edwards says. "Companies aren't just extending their labs to the masses and if it works, we'll give it a whirl."

Another downside, Edwards says, is that the audience who's participating may not be very diverse, trending toward the upscale, educated, technically savvy crowd. Companies need to be careful not to let these narrow groups overly sway their decision-making.

For instance, he says, Dell has decided to install Linux on its PCs as a result of high demand for the open-source operating system on IdeaStorm. "The suggestion got multiple thousands of votes, but [Dell] had to be careful that it wasn't just 10,000 Linux enthusiasts who don't represent the mass market," he says. "You can't let the crowd drive your entire product or service line."