9,662 research outputs found
A data-driven game theoretic strategy for developers in software crowdsourcing: a case study
Crowdsourcing has the advantages of being cost-effective and saving time, which is a typical embodiment of collective wisdom and community workers’ collaborative development. However, this development paradigm of software crowdsourcing has not been used widely. A very important reason is that requesters have limited knowledge about crowd workers’ professional skills and qualities. Another reason is that the crowd workers in the competition cannot get the appropriate reward, which affects their motivation. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a method of maximizing reward based on the crowdsourcing ability of workers, they can choose tasks according to their own abilities to obtain appropriate bonuses. Our method includes two steps: Firstly, it puts forward a method to evaluate the crowd workers’ ability, then it analyzes the intensity of competition for tasks at Topcoder.com—an open community crowdsourcing platform—on the basis of the workers’ crowdsourcing ability; secondly, it follows dynamic programming ideas and builds game models under complete information in different cases, offering a strategy of reward maximization for workers by solving a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium. This paper employs crowdsourcing data from Topcoder.com to carry out experiments. The experimental results show that the distribution of workers’ crowdsourcing ability is uneven, and to some extent it can show the activity degree of crowdsourcing tasks. Meanwhile, according to the strategy of reward maximization, a crowd worker can get the theoretically maximum reward
Innovation Initiatives in Large Software Companies: A Systematic Mapping Study
To keep the competitive advantage and adapt to changes in the market and
technology, companies need to innovate in an organised, purposeful and
systematic manner. However, due to their size and complexity, large companies
tend to focus on maintaining their business, which can potentially lower their
agility to innovate. This study aims to provide an overview of the current
research on innovation initiatives and to identify the challenges of
implementing the initiatives in the context of large software companies. The
investigation was performed using a systematic mapping approach of published
literature on corporate innovation and entrepreneurship. Then it was
complemented with interviews with four experts with rich industry experience.
Our study results suggest that, there is a lack of high quality empirical
studies on innovation initiative in the context of large software companies. A
total of 7 studies are conducted in such context, which reported 5 types of
initiatives: intrapreneurship, bootlegging, internal venture, spin-off and
crowdsourcing. Our study offers three contributions. First, this paper
represents the map of existing literature on innovation initiatives inside
large companies. The second contribution is to provide an innovation initiative
tree. The third contribution is to identify key challenges faced by each
initiative in large software companies. At the strategic and tactical levels,
there is no difference between large software companies and other companies. At
the operational level, large software companies are highly influenced by the
advancement of Internet technology. Large software companies use open
innovation paradigm as part of their innovation initiatives. We envision a
future work is to further empirically evaluate the innovation initiative tree
in large software companies, which involves more practitioners from different
companies
Bringing Structure into Summaries: Crowdsourcing a Benchmark Corpus of Concept Maps
Concept maps can be used to concisely represent important information and
bring structure into large document collections. Therefore, we study a variant
of multi-document summarization that produces summaries in the form of concept
maps. However, suitable evaluation datasets for this task are currently
missing. To close this gap, we present a newly created corpus of concept maps
that summarize heterogeneous collections of web documents on educational
topics. It was created using a novel crowdsourcing approach that allows us to
efficiently determine important elements in large document collections. We
release the corpus along with a baseline system and proposed evaluation
protocol to enable further research on this variant of summarization.Comment: Published at EMNLP 201
Embracing open innovation to acquire external ideas and technologies and to transfer internal ideas and technologies outside
The objective of this dissertation is to increase understanding of how organizations can embrace open innovation in order to acquire external ideas and technologies from outside the organization, and to transfer internal ideas and technologies to outside the organization. The objective encompasses six sub-objectives, each addressed in one or more substudies. Altogether, the dissertation consists of nine substudies and a compendium summarizing the substudies.
An extensive literature review was conducted on open innovation and crowdsourcing literature (substudies 1–4). In the subsequent empirical substudies, both qualitative research methods (substudies 5–7) and quantitative research methods (substudies 8–9) were applied. The four literature review substudies provided insights on the body of knowledge on open innovation and crowdsourcing. These substudies unveiled most of the influential articles, authors, and journals of open innovation and crowdsourcing disciplines. Moreover, they identified research gaps in the current literature.
The empirical substudies offer several insightful findings. Substudy 5 shows how non-core ideas and technologies of a large firm can become valuable, especially for small firms. Intermediary platforms can find solutions to many pressing problems of large organizations by engaging renowned scientists from all over world (substudy 6). Intermediary platforms can also bring breakthrough innovations with novel mechanisms (substudy 7). Large firms are not only able to garner ideas by engaging their customers through crowdsourcing but they can also build long-lasting relations with their customers (substudies 8 and 9). Embracing open innovation brings challenges for firms too.
Firms need to change their organizational structures in order to be able to fully benefit from open innovation. When crowdsourcing is successful, it produces a very large number of new ideas. This has the consequence that firms need to allocate a significant amount of resources in order to identify the most promising ideas. In an idea contest, customarily, only one or a few best ideas are rewarded (substudy 7). Sometimes, no reward is provided for the selected idea (substudies 8 and 9). Most of the ideas that are received are not implemented in practice
Towards Crowdsourcing for Requirements Engineering
Crowdsourcing is an emerging, typically online, distributed problem solving and production model where a problem is solved through the involvement of a large number of people. In this study, we investigate the potential of crowdsourcing in aiding Requirements Engineering. Although the whole area is still to be explored fully, we focus on the Requirements Elicitation stage. In this paper, we survey the literature on crowdsourcing in a variety of disciplines and deduce a set of features which characterize its main constructs; the crowd and the crowd-sourcers. We then conduct two focus groups to explore the relationship between these features and the quality of requirements elicited via crowdsourcing. The analysis will lead to anumber of hypotheses to confirm and
enhance in a future research in the area. The ultimate goal is to systematically develop crowdsourcing platforms for Requirements Engineering and guarantee correctness and maximize efficiency
A Process Model for Crowdsourcing: Insights from the Literature on Implementation
The purpose of the current study is to systematically review the crowdsourcing literature, extract the activities which have been cited, and synthesise these activities into a general process model. For this to happen, we reviewed the related literature on crowdsourcing methods as well as relevant case studies and extracted the activities which they referred to as part of crowdsourcing projects. The systematic review of the related literature and an in-depth analysis of the steps in those papers were followed by a synthesis of the extracted activities resulting in an eleven-phase process model. This process model covers all of the activities suggested by the literature. This paper then briefly discusses activities in each phase and concludes with a number of implications for both academics and practitioners
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