Last night, I attended a very thought-provoking Ad Club (#adclub) event, “All About Crowdsourcing,” featuring authors Edward Boches and John Winsor. John, VP of Strategy & Innovation at Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, recently wrote a piece in BusinessWeek about what crowdsourcing means for innovation. Edward, Chief Creative Officer/Chief Social Media Officer at Mullen, is a marketing guru and has a very cool blog called creativity_unbound.

I was surprised to see so many people have such strong opinions on crowdsourcing. But whether they liked it or not, it was obvious the model is having a big impact on businesses today. As Edward pointed out, “Crowdsourcing is here to stay.”

Using examples such as CrowdSpring, PopTent, Innocentive, and uTest (in addition to Dell and Starbucks), John emphasized how crowdsourcing truly offers people more opportunities to innovate, build a reputation in their field of expertise, and make some money too.

With more and more companies tapping into the wisdom of crowds, they are really allowing people to be creative in new ways. People no longer need to move to NYC or San Fran to have a creative voice – crowdsourcing platforms give them equal opportunity no matter where they are.

Edward went so far as to say the paradigm shift has been so relevant that soon we’ll have the title – “Director of Crowdsourcing” – in companies worldwide. It’s true that just a couple years ago people were saying blogs and social media were irrelevant, and now the titles of Community Manager and Social Media Manager are becoming mainstream.

Steve Lohr of the New York Times recently wrote that crowdsourcing “models succeed only when carefully designed for a particular task and when the incentives are tailored to attract the most effective collaborators.”

What do you think?