Crowdsourcing: does the model work for industrial software engineering?

Wikipedia defines Crowdsourcing as "the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call". Tim Ringo, head of IBM Human Capital Management, has been recently quoted saying "I think crowd sourcing is really important, where you would have a core set of employees but the vast majority are sub-contracted out".