A nice, big-picture view of Crowdsourcing a.k.a. Open Innovation, from Jeff Howe of Wired.

The real question keeps coming back to how companies effectively harness this creative energy and create value. Meaning – how do traditional businesses earn revenue and pay salaries when all the value-creation is hemorrhaging out into the crowd?

The example of how crowdsourcing in the area of stock photography reduced the average cost of an image from 300 dollars to one dollar — is terrifying. Similarly The value of 11 newspaper companies traded on the public market since 2005 dove a combined $23.7 billion in the first half of this year. There will continue to be much gnashing of teeth as this creative destruction marches forward.