New trend in outsourcing: microtasking

Is it crowdsourcing? In a way, yes… except that in this model the outsourcing of tasks is not done to an anonymous crowd per se.

Is it social entrepreneurship? In the eyes of Samasource, yes, definitely. The aim is to help out poorer classes get some kind of paid job.

Fact is, with the emergence of microtasking, outsourcing takes quite a different proportion. This definitely makes sense for companies: why bother paying relatively high waged locals to do relatively low-skilled tasks, while one could outsource this to a multitude of eager people in emerging countries? Surely it’s more efficient to do so, and on top companies can profile themselves as doing something good for society.

I have quite some difficulties imagining which specific tasks this would be, but according to the CEO of Samasource beneath, there should be plenty. No doubt this might become big: