Crowdsourcing as a way to access external knowledge for innovation

This paper focuses on “crowdsourcing” as a significant trend in the new paradigm of open innovation (Chesbrough 2006; Chesbrough & Appleyard 2007). Crowdsourcing conveys the idea of opening the R&D processes to “the crowd” through a web 2.0 infrastructure. Based on two cases studies of crowdsourcing webstartups (Wilogo and CrowdSpirit), the paper aims to build a framework to characterize and interpret the tension between value creation by a community and value capture by a private economic actor. Contributing to the discussions on “hybrid organizational forms” in organizational studies (Bruce & Jordan 2007), the analysis examines how theses new models combine various forms of relationships and exchanges (market or non market). It describes how crowdsourcing conveys new patterns of control, incentives and co-ordination mechanisms.communauté ; crowdsourcing ; innovation ; formes organisationnelles hybrides ; plateforme ; web 2.0

What You Know and What You Don\u27t Know: A Discussion of Knowledge Intensity and Support Architectures in Improving Crowdsourcing Creativity

Building on the componential theory of creativity, we studied how the crowdsourcing creativity support architectures and the task knowledge intensity levels affect the crowd’s creativity. Using an online experiment, we found that remixing can trigger the crowd to be more creative than external stimuli and using either architecture triggers the crowd to be more creative overall. Also, the crowd is more creative in solving low-knowledge-intensity tasks than in solving high-knowledge-intensity tasks. Interestingly, regardless of the knowledge intensity levels of tasks, crowdsourcing support architectures have a significant impact on the crowd’s creativity. Therefore, our paper contributes to the crowdsourcing literature on promoting crowd creativity and provides practical implications on solving societal challenges, especially large-scale problems