The topic of this master thesis is crowdsourcing – the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. Since crowdsourcing relies on the wisdom of crowds, this thesis covers the conditions that are necessary for the crowd to be wise and how to realize the crowd’s potential. It shows the emergence and the rise of this business practice before 21st century when most people were confined to relatively limited economic roles. Special emphasis is placed on the application of crowdsourcing after the development of information technology and Web 2.0 that have enabled ordinary consumers to become an important part of every company. The thesis deals with two major themes. Firstly, the ways companies can take advantage of the wisdom of crowds to obtain new ideas, services and content. Secondly, it also deals with the crowd’s new possibilities of self-organizing, coordination and communication they have recognized and used to develop products and services which now compete with those of the biggest global companies. This wouldn’t be possible without the development of information technologies which are the reason why are we talking today about a completely new type of economy, known as “the collaborative economy”.