Crowdsourcing for “Kiosk of the Future” – A Retail Store Case Study

This article reports on a case study which describes how Valora Retail, the company that operates the majority of Kiosks inSwitzerland, successfully completed a intermediary mediated Crowdsourcing project as well as the results they achievedusing this open innovation approach to generate ideas for the internal project named the “Kiosk of the Future”. Out of the626 ideas virtually submitted by the crowdsourcing community, 64 ideas were evaluated to be relevant for the project and the19 best ideas were given rewards and were considered for further internal analysis and development. This case study detailsthe process by which the top ideas were chosen and clearly demonstrates a successful application of Crowdsourcing for ideageneration for the early innovation process. It was reported that the achieved outcome of this project would unlikely haveoriginated from the company itself due to high internal barriers

Towards Successful Crowdsourcing Projects: Evaluating the Implementation of Governance Mechanisms

The last decade has witnessed the proliferation of crowdsourcing in various academic domains including strategic management, computer science, or IS research. Numerous companies have drawn on this concept and leveraged the wisdom of crowds for various purposes. However, not all crowdsourcing projects turn out to be a striking success. Hence, research and practice are on the lookout for the main factors influencing the success of crowdsourcing projects. In this context, proper governance is considered as the key to success by several researchers. However, little is known about governance mechanisms and their impact on project outcomes. We address this issue by means of a multiple case analysis in the scope of which we examine crowdsourcing projects on collaboration-based and/or competition-based crowdsourcing systems. Our initial study reveals that task definition mechanisms and quality assurance mechanisms have the highest impact on the success of crowdsourcing projects, whereas task allocation mechanisms are less decisive

Certainty Affect Detection in Informal Text

Uncertain and varied contexts have been shown to change individual skills and perceptions, particularly of leaders (Rast, 2012; Hutchison, Jetten & Gutierrez, 2011; Smith, Hogg, Martin & Terry, 2007). For this reason, we investigate the certain and uncertain affect of active players in a voluntary, virtual organization. Uncertainty is a constant in human interaction, and we investigate active players’ text for patterns of certainty and uncertainty affect that can assist in understanding social interactions in online communities. In this forum data, the most active players expressed significantly less uncertain or mixed certainty affect. We discuss how certainty and uncertainty affect detection provides a window into teaming and community dynamics

Understanding User Engagement in the Open Collaboration Model of Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing refers to the use of technologies to gather the collective effort and wisdom from an undefined group of online users for organizational innovation and/or problem solving. Further, open collaboration model refers to the crowdsourcing type wherein the crowd members discuss the submitted contributions among themselves to provide the final outcomes to problem owners. Regardless of crowdsourcing forms, a critical challenge for crowdsourcing service providers is to engage online participants in making sustained contributions. Inspired by Flow Theory (Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihayi, 1988), the purpose of this dissertation is to examine whether the conditions of challenge-skill balance and clear and immediate feedback invoke the flow state, specifically an absorbed and enjoyable experience, and consequently make Internet users more engaged in the open collaboration events. The proposed relationships were tested through lab experiment, with the flow state being measured through both self-report survey and eye-tracking. As for the results, I found that perceived challenge-skill balance and perceived feedback were associated with the invocation of fun, but not the holistic flow experience in the brainstorming task. Moreover, fun was also found to positively associate with the indicators of the intensity and sustainability of user engagement. I also identified some exploratory ocular patterns of participants when they enjoyed the task at hand

A longitudinal study of IT-enabled crowdsourcing performance in a business context

Advances in internet-mediated collaborative technologies have allowed for a wide range of “open” and “crowdsourced” approaches. IT-enabled crowdsourcing (referred to as CS in this dissertation) is defined as technology enabled phenomenon of outsourcing tasks through an open call to the masses via the internet. CS practices have played an important role in facilitating search for external sources of innovation in online communities and open platforms. Over the past decade, research and practices on the new phenomenon of CS enabled by technological advances have continued to grow, evolve and revolutionize the way work gets done (e.g. Wikipedia, Kaggle, GalaxyZoo, Uber, Amazon Mechanical Turk, GoFundMe). Although several studies have been conducted in this area, few of them focused on understanding the interaction and integration of all the main components involved in the process. The concepts, components, and performance of IT-enabled crowd-sourced activities are not clear yet. Additionally, the power of (a) crowd has been largely ignored in idea generation and business consulting activities where the crowd needs to have specialized skills and high level of creativity to solve complex business problems. To address these knowledge gaps, the first section of this study identifies the main components involved in a CS process by developing a conceptual framework based on the current literature and applications. The conceptual model presented in this study takes a holistic view of the CS projects considering all the operations and factors involved. The framework allows for full, yet parsimonious, consideration of the factors that may affect the crowd’s participation effort and performance. Developing a conceptual framework expands our understanding of this phenomenon and helps to differentiate various cases based on fundamental dimensions and characteristics. The conceptual framework suggests that in order to define the dimensions of any IT-enabled CS process, we need to answer the following questions: Who? (who initiates the process? who benefits from it? who performs the task?) Why? (why does the crowd participate in the process?) What? (what is the task?) How? (how does the crowd perform the task [platform]?). Different combinations of answers to these questions, describe different types of CS processes. In the second part of this dissertation, a longitudinal study is conducted to investigate the dynamics of the major components involved in the process and their impact on individual participant’s effort and level of performance over time. Applying a longitudinal study might be the most appropriate way of studying the CS process which, to our knowledge, has not been reported in the literature before. Data from an open-source community is used to assess the dissertation model. This platform selects and crowd-sources real-life business challenges. Thousands of people from around the world take part in the competition and try to develop solutions for these challenges. The best solutions are being rewarded by monetary prizes and post-market compensation. Analyzing over 2,500 records of data, we find that the crowd characteristics (skill level, IT efficacy, international experience), their motivation (learning and direct compensations), task clarity, and communication and collaboration platform’s characteristics (ease-of-use, usefulness, media richness) impact the crowd’s participation behavior and performance. In the case of this study, since individuals compete in groups, perception of team’s behavior also has correlations with individual effort and performance. Additionally, the longitudinal study verifies that these relationships change throughout the process. In the third part of the dissertation, a qualitative study is conducted by interviewing some of the individual members of the crowd to further explain the results of the quantitative study. The interviews provide rich insights, help expand our understanding of the process, and better define the characteristics of each component involved in the process. The interpretive study also shows that the relationships between these components and the crowd’s participation behavior and performance change over time. A modified version of the CS conceptual framework in a business context is presented at the end of this section. Overall, this dissertation provides a better understanding of a technology-enabled CS process and examines the characteristics of its main components that might influence crowd’s participation behavior and performance in a business context. The results of this study could potentially fill the knowledge gap in the literature on the crowd’s performance in an IT-enabled CS process in a business domain. Understanding the crowd’s behavior can guide initiators to design proper mechanisms to attract and maintain participation of the right crowd. It provides guidance for organizations to leverage CS for activities such as business consulting, product development, and idea generation in the best possible way. The results of this study make substantial contributions to identifying the main characteristics of a CS process as a legitimate, IT-enabled form of problem solving