The Promise of Idea Crowdsourcing: Benefits, Contexts, Limitations (original) (raw)
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The Promise of Idea Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing has become a hype term associated with unrealistic expectations for innovation implications and unclear understanding of its requirements and challenges. This paper intends to bring together and evaluate the key studies that shed light on the phenomenon, either conceptually or empirically, and help us qualify and attenuate the expectations.
Cheer the crowd? Facilitating user participation in idea crowdsourcing
External crowds provide organisations with valuable knowledge and new ideas in a cost-effective way. While existing research has focused on the users and the general characteristics of crowdsourcing, there is still a lack of understanding of how the hosting organisation should organise and govern crowdsourcing initiatives. Building on the literature from the fields of innovation management, knowledge management, marketing and electronic commerce, with real-world illustrations, we develop a framework to facilitate the participation of external crowds in idea crowdsourcing tasks. Our study identifies six management practices related to the different phases of idea crowdsourcing: selecting appropriate communication technologies; defining tasks; evaluating crowd size and its knowledge base; launching tasks and supporting interpretation; giving feedback and encouraging interaction, and allowing user-driven idea evaluations. The study contributes to the literature on innovation management and crowdsourcing, while also offering practical insight into how to better cultivate the wisdom of external crowds.
The crowdsourcing data for innovation
European Journal of Management Issues
Purpose – to explore a crowdsourcing data-driven approach to construct crowdknowledge databases for innovation through supporting creative idea generation. In the approach, social media will be used as platforms to crowdsource knowledge for producing the databases. Findings. Creativity is an essential element of innovation, but producing creative ideas is often challenging in design. Many computational tools have become available recently to support designers in producing creative ideas that are new to individuals. As a standard feature, most of the tools rely on the databases employed, such as ConceptNet and the US Patent Database. This study highlighted that the limitations of these databases have constrained the capabilities of the tools and, thereby, new computational databases supporting the generation of new ideas to a crowd or even history are needed. Crowdsourcing outsources tasks conventionally performed in-house to a crowd and uses external knowledge to solve problems and ...
2020
ion, addressing, and guiding small aspects of the crowdsourcing process instead of offering high-level support. For example, Cullina et al. (2016) discuss the need to understand crowd motivation in contests, which is a single factor contributing to the successful implementation of crowdsourcing. By presenting a highlevel crowdsourcing framework for computational creativity, the authors offer more holistic guidance for crowdsourcing applications. 4.4. The Crowdsourcing Data-driven Approach s illustrated above, crowdsourcing initiatives allow varied and numerous data points to be collected from the crowd. They are particularly useful in early design phases as the prerequisite skill level for participation in these phases. This section demonstrates how crowdsourcing could acquire knowledge from a crowd to support creative design activities in new product design and development, such as idea generation and evaluation, by partnering crowdsourcing with computational creativity tools. A no...
Harnessing Innovation Potential of Crowdsourcing
The new innovation paradigm is based upon articulation of external and internal sources of innovation. Nowadays, crowdsourcing is coming up as significant external source in innovation processes of the companies. Crowdsourcing enables harnessing of initiatives, ideas, solutions and knowledge of the crowd so as to enhance innovation performance and induce a value creation. Given that existing innovation literature does not cover sufficiently the issues related to crowdsourcing this paper is to offer an additional views about innovation potentials of crowdsourcing thus contributing for future research on this relatively unexplored concept. Therefore, this paper aims at considering key insights about crowdsourcing contribution on developing companies' innovation capacity. More specifically it is focused on identification of benefits, weaknesses and risks arising from crowdsourcing to the innovation process comprising conceptual and empirical aspects.
Crowdsourcing A pandemonium for disruptive innovation
With each paradigm shift the world changes radically. People and organisations need to adapt to the new circumstances. The world as we know it is changing rapidly and is shifting from a consumer to a creator economy. In this third industrial revolution consumers do not only consume but also produce products and services tailored to their individual requirements. This is facilitated mainly through people’s access to open digital networks, in which everyone can express their wishes. Within this context organisations have difficulties finding, identifying and accepting new ideas. Crowdsourcing has proved to be a useful tool for this new era because it is goal oriented and compatible with prevailing top- down, traditional management structures. It allows companies to tap into the creative and collective mind of the masses whilst still allowing people to fulfil their participatory role. However, extensive research has uncovered that crowds and the sponsor of crowdsourcing initiatives are still not optimally aligned. The possible reasons for this are manifold. The main cause could lie in the sponsors. Crowdsourcing is mainly utilised to create promotional campaigns and new product or service development with incremental change yet disruptive outputs are rejected due to their misalignment with the prevailing order of things. Another possible reason is the programmatic way in which crowdsourcing initiatives form a small component of a linear, milestone-based change process. It is used as a tool only for sourcing ideas. No information has indicated that the crowdsourcing tool is being used for exploration of a problem, gaining insights into human behaviour, or experimentation with conceptual prototypes. Initiatives are usually one-off events. Sponsors don’t seem to engage more than once to launch reiterative challenges in order to allow for a concept to develop. Furthermore, research has shown that the tools need to be adjusted in order to render more aligned results. The necessary diversity of the crowd contributing ideas is rather low and the tools do not have mechanisms that ensure a higher degree of diversity. In addition the tools do not motivate the participants to initiate and maintain a fruitful creative interaction. This is made evident through the possibility of giving final judgments early in the interactive process and the lack of mechanisms that allow concurrent and private work streams. In order to profit from the potential that crowdsourcing has to offer, three things need to change: 1. Sponsoring organisations will need to change their attitude and become more experimental and ready to embrace risk and failure 2. The tools will need to reach a higher degree of sophistication 3. The crowdsourcing tool needs to be deployed as part of the design process. Last but not least the research has also uncovered that crowdsourcing in general is a disruptive tool in itself because it can, and does, actually replace many functions performed by established organisations. A combination of these could lead to a fully crowdsourced enterprise.
Crowd-Innovation: Crowdsourcing Platforms for Innovation
Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, 2021
Companies fostering innovation take advantage of an emergent combination of various factors such as the human brains, tools, networks, and technologies. Crowdsourcing platforms support all these elements together and offer quite an interesting tool for all the innovation phases, from idea creation to the market. Despite increasing utilization of these platforms, a systematic analysis of the supported type of services and contributions is missing. This work aims to analyze some of the most used crowdsourcing platforms and to classify them according to the type of contribution they may provide in the innovation process. Using an emerging approach analysis, the following contribution phases have been revealed: idea contests, ongoing idea platforms, platforms for idea screening, innovation platforms, R&D platforms, design contest platforms, ongoing design platforms, creative contests, and platforms for virtual concept testing. In this paper, these nine categories are described in depth to explain how they serve various phases of the innovation process: idea generation and testing; research and development of rough concepts, detailed concept and testing, production, and market launch. a
Crowdsourcing ideas: Involving ordinary users in the ideation phase of new product development
Research Policy, 2016
The different roles of users in new product development (NPD) have been extensively described. Currently online idea crowdsourcing, via long-term open idea calls, is increasingly being used by companies to collect new product ideas from ordinary users. Such open idea calls can result in thousands of suggested ideas and detecting the ones that a company wants to implement can be problematic. Empirical research in this area is lacking. We therefore investigate which ideator and idea-related characteristics determine whether an idea for NPD is implemented by a crowdsourcing company. To answer this question, we use a cross-sectional research design to analyse publicly available data from an open idea call, run by an internationally active beverage producer. Our results reveal that ideators paying major attention to crowdsourced ideas of others, the idea popularity, as well as its potential innovativeness positively influence whether an idea is implemented by the crowdsourcing company. Counterintuitively, the motivation of an ideator, reflected in the number of ideas suggested, does not influence the likelihood of an idea being implemented.
Crowdsourcing: Looking for a Pattern
2016
During last years the relevance of crowdsourcing has increased both among scholars and practitioners: about the 85% of the Best Global Brands developed crowdsourcing projects during last 10 years (eYeca, Annual Report 2015) and the bibliometric indexes on the topic show an increasing trend (ISI WEB of Knowledge, 2016) of publications. Collaboration and, more specifically, the integration of resources of different actors (Carida et al., 2014) now arise as pre-conditions for the definition of the process of value creation which business model have to be addressed to (Zott et al., 2011). The crowd is a relevant source of innovation for firms (Brem, Bilgram, 2015) and the collective creativity (Boulaire et al. 2010) that it expresses (Majchrzach, Malorta 2013; Colurcio et al., 2012) is a valuable contribution as it matches knowledge and creative potential belonging to several individuals (Peppler, Solomou, 2011). Collective creativity is a unique and not replicable resource that come fr...