It’s helped fund projects ranging from the re-launch of Reading Rainbow to a portable 60-quart cooler that contains a battery-powered rechargeable blender, waterproof Bluetooth speaker, USB charger and cutting board.

Kickstarter has made famous the concept of obtaining needed services, ideas or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. And according to a recent report from insurance strategic advisory firm Strategy Meets Action (SMA), it’s part of a larger crowdsourcing and open innovation movement that has hit the mainstream through other websites like Indiegogo, Crowdrise, Quirky and Tilt—and that means it’s time to figure out how the independent agency channel can embrace the opportunity.

“It’s being able to leverage knowledge, creativity and the expertise of people regardless if they’re in their organization or not,” says Denise Garth, partner and chief digital officer at SMA.

By eliminating the traditional boundaries between companies, crowdsourcing enables internal and external mass collaboration and engagement, which is “now becoming an integral part of how you run a business and manage a business,” Garth says. It has led to open innovation—the identification, development and marketing of the new ideas, products or services retained within the crowdsourcing community—and has contributed to the growth of an increasingly shared economy.

Garth acknowledges that millennials are fueling the change—instead of owning things, they’re accustomed to subscriptions like Pandora, Netflix and Twitter that give them quick, easy access. This mindset shift caters toward greater sharing and access, which has led to these innovative platforms and processes that are creating a much more collaborative world—resulting transforming business models and processes.

According to the SMA report, “Crowdsourcing and Open Innovation: Powering the Sharing Economy,” “while many insurers see crowdsourcing and open innovation as risky, other industries are seeing and experiencing the transformative power that is delineating and creating new market leaders.” Specifically, the crowdsourcing and open innovation movement is reshaping seven business areas—financial, products, services, transportation, property, technology and product development—which are impacting the expectations of how traditional industries, like insurance, do business.

So how can crowdsourcing and open innovation benefit the independent agency channel? For agents, Garth says it’s about “recognizing the power of crowdsourcing and how it can provide access to a broad range of people for ideas.” But it’s also about identifying its capability to reach broader market segments—leading to engagement and offerings in new products and services.

Examples include alternative agency structures like utilizing crowdsourcing expertise physically outside of the office or transforming the claims process by using mobile apps for on-site assessment and verification report creation from geographically located part-time employees.

“It opens up the opportunity to rethink the business model and the business processes,” Garth explains. “How can you leverage knowledge and expertise in different ways, rather than with fulltime employees? It creates a new offering of services that you may not be able to necessarily provide without it.”

Although larger companies like Proctor and Gamble, Anheuser-Busch and Uber have taken the reins on implementing crowdsourcing in their business practices, Garth brings it down to the agency level: “How could agents leverage these crowdsourcing companies that have started to develop or deliver new kinds of solutions or services in a quicker and cost effective way?” she asks. “Look at setting up a unique collaboration with shared customers that together could provide something more valuable to the customer than they could independently by themselves.”

Even if you aren’t interested in collaborating through workflow, consider that the companies utilizing crowdsourcing and open innovation will always have insurance needs. “The shared service business models are redefining risks and passively identifying new risks,” Garth says. “In some cases it’s been difficult to find the right kind of insurance products to be able to cover these new kinds of businesses.”

And revolutionizing the customer service model is certainly on the horizon—think about using your own client base for mass collaboration. “If you have customers who are engaged in something that you’re doing in a different way and they become part of the future and solution, it creates a different kind of customer relationship and loyalty that others may not necessarily have,” Garth says.

The opportunities of crowdsourcing and open innovation are already proving to be transformative. “Companies who are leading innovation in their industries are moving forward rather rapidly doing things in different ways,” Garth says. “This is one way to bring in knowledge and expertise—no one organization can have it all.”