Information Technology (IT) enabled crowdsourcing: A conceptual framework

IT-enabled crowdsourcing is defined as technology-enabled outsourcing of tasks through an open call to the masses via the internet. Crowdsourcing is an IT artifact that has gone beyond the traditional boundaries of an organization to a much broader context. Over the past decade, research and practice on crowdsourcing have continued to grow, evolve, and revolutionize the way work gets done. Although numerous studies have been conducted in this area, our understanding of the main components involved in crowdsourcing processes remains limited. The goal of the current study is to conduct a structured literature review and synthesize the available crowdsourcing literature and applications in one coherent conceptual framework. The framework identifies the main elements involved in the crowdsourcing process and its characteristics. This framework extends the field of Information Systems (IS) and would help us better understand this phenomenon. Furthermore, the results of this study could potentially fill the knowledge gap in the crowdsourcing literature by identifying the main characteristics of a crowdsourcing process as a legitimate, IT-enabled form of problem-solving. Our results would also help organizations to leverage crowdsourcing more efficiently