Crowd-Based Business Models

“Consumers have become interactive with businesses today and crowd behavior has emerged as a guiding factor to business growth. Crowd-based business modeling is a contemporary tool to success… yet firms need to work on it. This book, written in a simple way with examples, is a timely contribution and a must read for everyone.” --Raquel Castaño, PhD, Vice-rector for Faculty Development, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico

“The book articulates the importance of the new business practice as well as challenges associate with it and offers propositions on how to meet these challenges. Discussions in the book clearly explains the paradigm shift that we are experiencing currently in business practices due to increasing use of information markets and in developing tools to effectively deal with customer-centric decisions. This contribution is an indispensable gift to students of business management and to business practitioners.” -- Demetri Kantarelis, Ph.D., Professor of Economics, Grenon School of Business, Assumption University, Worcester, MA

This book distinctively presents nine thematic discussions with live examples of small and large companies across the geographic destinations. Among many points of interest crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, decision-processes, technology, leadership, consumer behavior, crowd-based services designing, and future perspectives in the context of crowd-based business modelling and collective intelligence are central to the discussions in the book.

This book argues that crowd is the pivot of marketing. It fills the knowledge gap on people-led enterprises by integrating the customer ideation process in developing crowd-based business models to achieve performance with purpose and proposes crowd-based business strategies in the emerging markets and significantly contributes to the existing literature.

Rajagopal is Professor of Marketing at EGADE Business School of Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City Campus and Life Fellow of the Royal Society for Encouragement of Arts, Commerce, and Manufacture, London, United Kingdom. Dr. Rajagopal is serving as Visiting Professor at Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, since 2013 and is also adjunct professor at the UFV India Global Education of the University of the Fraser Valley, Canada.