For those who don’t know - the word crowd-sourcing had it’s genesis in a 2006 Wired Article written by Jeff Howe and is defined as ”the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call”

Crowd-sourcing is more relevant than ever today because of the decreased transaction and information sharing costs that the Internet enables. As such it’s great to see aussie startups, like Design Bay, moving into the space.

DesignBay.com is a crowd-sourcing marketplace for logo design, web design and graphic design. It was founded by Alec Lynch in early 2008 and in early 2009 Darren Kwan came on board. The pair are both ex Booz and Co consultants with educational backgrounds in IT & Art. Sounds like just the right mix to grow a business like Design Bay.

Lynch explained the Design Bay benefits for both businesses and designers:

Businesses can use DesignBay to get designs and ideas from hundreds of designers around the world.

An average project receives over 50 designs from 20 competing designers.

Businesses can save money on creative services by accessing freelance, offshore and student designers or by requesting quotes from competing designers.

Designers can use DesignBay to get opportunities to be creative and to earn more money. They can market themselves globally, find new clients and build their portfolios.

There are a bunch of competitors in the space including Elance, oDesk, CrowdSpring and even another Aussie start-up 99 Designs that is one of the market-leaders. All this competition is a good thing, though, as it verifies the validity of the idea. Notwithstanding that competition,  Design Bay continues to grow well and has recently added global footwear and apparel brand, Hi-Tec as a customer.

Despite all the good the company has been doing so far, in the end the real determinant of success for DesignBay, will be the same as it is for all crowd-sourcing companies - whether or not the contributors, in this case the designers, want to continue doing the work and going to tender for every job.

Rather appropriately, for this post, it is the design community that has been the most vocal in labelling crowd-sourcing as evil. Then again, perhaps that’s just a vocal minority, particularly when you consider that, as an example, 99 Designs, has paid out over $4Million to contibutors so far.

Personally, I think that the crowd-sourcing is beginning its run, rather than ending it, and that those organisations that can create the best marketplaces (what the “best” is will depend on the players) will succeed. In that respect, Design Bay has done a good job of positioning itself to be one of the leaders in the design crowd-sourcing area. I also think it’s fantastic that we have yet another aussie startup leveraging the ability of the Internet to make our geography (both ours and the geography of participants) meaningless, in terms of enabling connections between people and organisations.

I’m definitley hoping that we see more crowd-sourcing apps come out of Australia and we’re able to create a cluster of sorts here. Crowd-sourcing isn’t the right solution for everything, but it’s going to be the best solution for many things and we should try to get on that train while we still can.