Abstract
In this chapter, we argue that crowdsourcing can be a promising tool for addressing societal challenges by harnessing the knowledge and creativity of the crowds. Comparing the design elements and communication assumptions of crowdsourcing for well-structured organizational problems with that of ill-structured societal challenges, we analyse how crowdsourcing can be adapted to enable the integration of diverse knowledge. We offer an illustration of diverse knowledge integration in collaborative crowdsourcing used to co-create solutions to the problem of food waste. Future research directions include the role of problem framing and participatory architectures to harness crowdsourcing for greater societal impact. This chapter begins with a review of the existing crowdsourcing literature, followed by our analysis and illustration, and concludes with a discussion of future research directions.