The Digital Economy of Crowdsourcing: Crowd Shipping Model as E-Business

Today's business worldwide is navigating in the digital economy that utilizes services of the crowds for the completion of tasks. Traditional models dependent on internal human resources (in-source) are now being outsourced to the public, expanding faster into new market sectors. With evolving information and communication technologies (ICT) and the internet of things (IoT), novel and customized business models emerged, moving toward decentralized network systems where individuals (peer-to-peer) may participate in the so-called crowdsourcing. This paper focuses particularly on the delivery of products in crowd shipping, creating a delivery service through crowd usage. A generic business model for applications in crowd shipping is addressed, whereby we proposed a crowd shipping delivery model, that utilizes commercial airplanes for low weight packages (below 1 Kg). The responsiveness is advantageous for the continuous flight schedules, while the lightweight involves more travelers for facilitating the delivery of products. It has been shown how large this brand-new transportation mode (based on the crowd) will grow if the appropriate infrastructure is implemented to evolve with the digital economy.