C. Lewis Kausel,

In the design side of reward-based crowdfunding, the project founder generally has an idea for a product or service and is soliciting funding. The people who support such projects via financial contribution are people who expect to be future users of that product or service, and can be expected to be enthusiastic about project outcomes.

Crowdsourcing is structurally quite distinct from crowdfunding, in that it's about leveraging the crowd's creative labor rather than their financial resources, but the two aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, a barrier to crowdsourcing is often that you need to motivate the crowd to contribute. As described above, the backers of products or services in reward-based crowdfunding are enthusiastic and motivated, meaning that they are good sources of creative feedback for such projects.

Common types of participatory practices include providing backers with access to beta testing of software, voting on elements of project outcomes, providing backers with developer kits to generate supplemental materials, or entirely open-sourced projects created via crowdfunding. Currently the research on this topic is just starting, so we haven't identified whether these different types of participation affect project outcomes appreciably or differently, but we have found that each type is prevalent in different crowdfunding contexts.

This is just a quick introduction to the topic, but I hope it addresses your question. I think that there are a variety of ways in which the dynamics of crowdfunding impact the design and development process of new products and services in modern society, and would like to encourage researchers to start trying to measure these changes.

You may be interested in reading my latest paper on crowdfunding, where the microeconomic implications of reward-based crowdfunding are explored. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2437786 (also accessible through my page on ResearchGate).