WHILE the '60s had people power, and the '80s spawned consumer power, the first decade of the 21st century is seeing another form of people power but with a monetary motivation. People are back wearing flowers in their hair, but they want their cut from the flower seller.

Last week, Richard Branson and former US vice president Al Gore launched a contest to find the best way of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Their goal is that the winning idea will take one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the air each year for the next ten years. The competition is open to the whole world and the group or person who comes up with the best idea will win $5m and another $20m after the 10 years.

This idea of offering rewards and bribes to the public to solve problems is nothing new.

Even in the Bible, bounties and rewards ensured your enemies were eradicated and the public acted like a private security force. With advances in technology, reward notices have evolved into worldwide tenders to figure out how to get the figs into your new figrolls, to tell you where to dig for gold, and these notices can even can go as far as to ask the public to design products for you to sell at a profit.

'Crowdsourcing', a term invented by journalists Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, is a business model that outsources the creation of intellectual property to a motley crew of strangers, amateurs and part-time hobbyists. Unlike open sourcing, crowdsourcing strongly protects the intellectual property that is acquired.

A business can share the revenue with these strangers or can pay them a standard fee in return for full rights to the intellectual property.

One poster child for crowdsourcing is an unlikely old-world company that is employing new world tricks.

Mining company GoldCorp knew there was gold in tham thar hills but didn't know where, and wanted to do more than guess the location of the rich veins of precious metal.

Instead of trial-and-error hunting which would take years, in 2000 its CEO Rob McEwen released via its website, geological data on one of its prospects to the public in a competition to guess the best locations.

Thousands of people from all over the world, from every walk of life, submitted solutions, and after going through them, the most reasoned solutions were chosen. In total the contestants identified 110 locations of gold deposits, half of which the company had not identified. Over eight million ounces of gold have been found so far thanks to this project, two million more than was expected.

GoldCorp's project may have been the mining equivalent of Spot The Ball, but other companies have taken the processing power of people a little further again. Threadless. com is a website that sells t-shirts, and as well as in-house designers, the site has ongoing public competitions to find its next t-shirt designs.

The site makes it easy as possible for people to submit designs by publishing guidelines and templates; Threadless then uses its own audience to rate the designs and picks finalists based on this.

The winners get $1,500 in cash, free tshirts and a few hundred dollars worth of t-shirt vouchers while Threadless gets the right to the design.

For Threadless the creative power of people is making it a profitable and powerful group. While many design firms have staff that have good and bad streaks, all Threadless needs is one person to have a killer idea, which the audience filters out, and the company has a hit on its hands.

While some companies such as Sun Microsystems are building inter-continental computer processing grids, grouping together the processing power of tens of thousands of computers, Amazon has created a human-powered equivalent called 'The Mechanical Turk'. This computer-to-human interface allows someone to create a processing job on the Turk and this task is filtered off to a human being at the end of a keyboard who uses their creative or processing power to send data back to the system.

Some companies use the Turk for quick tech support queries, some use it as a data processing server and some use it to create 10,000 drawings of sheep.

How far can you take the idea of crowdsourcing? Cambrian House, a company in Canada, is seriously pushing the limits.

Like Threadless. com, it solicits input from its audience on what software applications it should build, but on deciding which products are the most interesting, it also gets the audience to contribute to building the applications.

So far over 4,000 ideas have been suggested and many of these have been turned into products. Idea creators, developers and Cambrian House all share the revenue for the sales of the products, and with hundreds or even thousands of people having a personal interest in these products, it also means you have a large marketing team for them.

Even presidential candidates are using the power of the people to help them out.

Hillary Clinton used the online questions and answers website Yahoo!

Answers to seek a reply to her question about healthcare in America.

To date 37,000 people have written replies.

Yahoo! Answers and other answers sites allow a company or individual to pose a question on any topic and offer an economic reward for the best answer or set of answers. While Hillary's team probably did this to get kudos from the large Yahoo! community, it does highlight the opportunities for companies who think a little differently.

Crowdsourcing can make your business more productive and tap into an unlimited supply of creativity and cheap labour. Instead of sourcing labour in your local market, you can now send out job lots to the world and build a community of passionate customers only too happy to muck in to improve the product they use.

When thousands of people, loosely joined, are your work and creative force, there are drawbacks. The levels of passion for a product might see some people being too stubborn to go with the flow and walking away rather than see the project go in a direction they don't like.

This can include you. Like open sourcing, crowdsourcing expects the business to give up some control in return for increased creativity.

Crowdsourcing may reduce the amount you invest in development and research but it also increases the amount of time spent interacting with your new diverse workforce. For those with fantastic people skills, crowdsourcing has fantastic benefits but for those who would rather concentrate on the development side themselves, then the evangelist role might be best left to someone else.

Crowdsourcing might not be for everyone, but the next time you think you need to bring in a very expensive outside consultant to solve one small thing, perhaps logging on to Yahoo! Answers instead, and seeking out some opinions, might save you time and money.