Difference Between Crowd Sourced and Collaborative

When an effort is crowd sourced, it does not mean necessarily that it is collaborative. That is - just because many people or teams are working on a project - they may all be working individually on solutions, and may be prohibited from collaborating with one another. Cooperation may still occur on teams - but if the numbers of teams is large - that means the effort is largely non-collaborative as teams vie against each other.

Crowd sourced efforts - from my (MJ) point of view - may be remarkably un-collaborative. I just examined this for HeroX - see HeroX Challenge and Collaboration. The rules explicitly prohibit building upon others'results (ie, copying). I could not find a single example of a collaborative challenge where people are encouraged to build upon another entrant's work.

Crowd sourcing is not collaborative when all the entrants are competing.

In summary, when an effort is crowd-sourced, don't assume that it is collaborative. Crowdsourcing takes advantage of a large number of contributions. But whether the effort is collaborative - or whether the results are for the public interest - needs to be examined separately to determine the value of a crowdsourcing effort.