GET THE BALANCE RIGHT: CAN NORMATIVE APPEALS ENCOURAGE FUNDERS TO SUPPORT SELECTED CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGNS?

Increasingly more and more people turn to crowdfunding, either as entrepreneurs to get their idea funded or as financiers to help others realizing what might become a successful business one day. One situation frequently encountered on crowdfunding platforms is that certain projects receive more funding than needed, whereas others fail to achieve sufficient funding. To this day, no research has examined how a more efficient distribution of funds on crowdfunding platforms can be achieved. Since crowdfunding is a highly social process, we propose social norms as a governance mechanism to balance crowd’s funds more efficiently. Therefore, this paper proposes an experiment to test if social normative appeals can be used as a tool to actively influence the funding behavior of individuals, ultimately increasing the number of funded campaigns

CUSTOMER INTEGRATION IN NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT - A LITERATURE REVIEW CONCERNING THE APPROPRIATENESS OF DIFFERENT CUSTOMER INTEGRATION METHODS TO ATTAIN CUSTOMER KNOWLEDGE

In many instances, customers are seen as one of the key resources for new product development (NPD), as they often have deep product knowledge as well as experience and creativity potential gained by regular product usage. From knowledge management perspective, customers? input to NPD is manifested in different forms of knowledge. Customers? input to NPD typically reflects their needs and wishes (need information) but may also represent suggestions describing how ideas can be transferred into marketable products (solution information), in some cases they even lead to radical innovations (leading edge information). In order to internalize customer knowledge, in theory different methods are discussed. However, little is known about these methods? effectiveness and efficiency to transmit customers? knowledge to firms. This research identifies a total of 15 methods with the help of a systematic literature review. By systematically analyzing these methods we found that there are methods within which customers are involved only ?passively? in NPD, as well as methods that enable a more ?active? customer integration. This study exhibits that the methods which enable an active customer integration, in comparison to methods where customers are integrated only passively in NPD, are more suitable for attaining customer knowledge within innovation development

Revolutionizing Crowdworking Campaigns: Conquering Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard with the Help of Smart Contracts

Crowdworking is increasingly being applied by companies to outsource tasks beyond their core competencies flexibly and cost-effectively to an unknown group. However, the anonymous and financially incentivized nature of crowdworkers creates information asymmetries and conflicts of interest, leading to inefficiencies and intensifying the principal-agent problem. Our paper offers a solution to the widespread problem of inefficient Crowdworking campaigns. We first derive the currently applied Crowdworking campaign process based on a qualitative study. Subsequently, we identify the broadest adverse selection and moral hazard problems in the process. We then analyze how the blockchain application of smart contracts can counteract those challenges and develop a process model that maps a Crowdworking campaign using smart contracts. We explain how our developed process significantly reduces adverse selection and moral hazard at each stage. Thus, our research provides approaches to make online labor more attractive and transparent for companies and online workers

Automized Assessment for Professional Skills – A Systematic Literature Review and Future Research Avenues

Globalization, technological progress, and demographic trends in-creasingly influence our labor markets. With changing labor markets and increas-ing digitalization, new competencies of workers are needed to meet demands. However, as a first step to developing these new skills, knowledge about the ex-isting skills and their status quo is necessary. Here, automated skill assessment offers a crucial added value, as it can create a reliable and objective database. Based on a systematic investigation, our analysis shows, in four different areas, how skills and competencies in the automated assessment are (1) defined, (2) included as an element of analysis, (3) methodically recorded and processed, (4) which data source is used. In doing so, we offer insights into existing approaches to automated assessment of professional skills. In doing so, we contribute to a better understanding of the design of automated skill assessment methods and provide perspectives on future research directions

BUILD YOUR CITY! – ENGAGING CITIZENS IN CROWDFUNDING PROJECTS

Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular financing instrument. Research in the field of crowdfunding mainly focusses on broadening access to finance for businesses, in particular young and innovative companies and SMEs. Our study looks beyond the potential of crowdfunding for businesses and focuses on crowdfunding as a digital government strategy. Applying insights from the literature on relationship marketing, donation behavior and crowdfunding, we develop a structural model which contains trust towards a city, commitment towards a city and the intention to fund a crowdfunding project initiated by a city as its core elements. Based on an online survey, we find that trust towards a city has a positive impact on commitment towards a city and that commitment towards a city has a positive impact on the intention to contribute to a city’s crowdfunding campaign. Certain benefits individuals perceive during a crowdfunding campaign (demonstrable, familial and societal benefits) have a positive impact on the commitment towards a city. Finally, communication has a positive impact on trust towards a city. Our study contributes to the literature on digital government, crowdfunding and relationship marketing and has practical implications. From our results, we derive specific recommendations for cities

MOTIVATIONS FOR CROWDFUNDING: WHAT DRIVES THE CROWD TO INVEST IN START-UPS?

Equity-based crowdfunding is an increasingly popular source to fund start-ups. In equity-based crowdfunding, a form of crowdsourcing, many crowdfundees collectively fund a start-up by providing parts of the requsted funding in prospect of financial returns. While extant research has provided insights into the crowd´s motives for participating in various forms of crowdsourcing initiatives, we know little about the motivations that drive the crowd to invest in start-ups via crowdfunding. In literature, there are ongoing calls to investigate this phenomenon since it is expected that motives for investing in start-ups via crowdfunding differ from motives for engaging in other forms of crowdsourcing initiatives. Against this background, this research aims at investigating why crowdfundees fund start-ups. In this research-in-progress paper we build on related literature to theoretically develop a research model and plan to validate this model with an empirical survey on an equity-based crowdfunding platform specialised on start-up funding. By giving concrete answers to this research qustions, our research will take up on a deeper understanding of the crowd´s motivation for investing in start-ups and therefore theoretically contributes to the understanding of the body of knowledge in motivations in crowdsourcing

Pyramiding 2.0: Exaptation of the Pyramiding Approach to Recruit New Idea Contributors for a Virtual Ideas Competition

When searching for user innovations, the identification of so called ‘technology lead users’ is one of the most important tasks. However, scientific literature indicates that the present measures to search and to recruit new members imply high spreading losses. As a con-sequence we develop the “Pyramiding 2.0” approach. Building on existing literature we develop a theory-motivated approach for systematically recruiting participants for a crowdsourcing environment with the help of a virtual social network. This paper describes our reasons for using the pyramiding approach and elaborates on the supposed benefits that an adaption of the pyramiding search within an online setting implies. Our findings confirm the assumption that the pyramiding 2.0 approach can be successfully applied to recruit new idea contributors for a virtual ideas competition. Moreover, our results show that pyramiding can be applied within a virtual social network, thereby expanding existing literature within the field of pyramiding

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

Does the Ability to Choose Matter? On the Relationship between Bring-your-own Behavior and IT Satisfaction

Employees increasingly complete organizational tasks using privately owned consumer technologies such as private devices (e.g., smartphones) or private Internet accounts (e.g., email accounts). Higher satisfaction constitutes a major reason for this bring-your-own behavior (BYOB). However, little research has theoretically explored and empirically tested this assumption. This study sheds light on this phenomenon by analyzing the effect of BYOB on IT satisfaction. Drawing from social cognitive theory, we propose choice self-efficacy as a new construct that intermediates the relationship between BYOB and IT satisfaction. Building on results from survey data (n = 400), we provide new evidence that BYOB has a positive effect on IT satisfaction whereby choice self-efficacy plays a vital element as it mediates this relationship. Since IT satisfaction shapes how people use technology and how they perform with it, we derive important implications for future research on IT consumerization. Furthermore, we provide several conclusions for practitioners and discuss how to enhance IT satisfaction and choice self-efficacy

Barriers for SMEs in Adopting Crowdsourcing

Despite its undisputable benefits for firms, crowdsourcing is rarely applied in small and medium sized enterprises (SME), yet. Until today extant literature provides only an uncomplete picture of the barriers that hinder SMEs from adopting crowdsourcing. Because of these incomplete insights on this phenomenon there is a great deal of uncertainty on how to overcome these barriers all the more. In the scope of an interview series with 15 SMEs we explore a range of different barriers. The findings from our study do not only expand the so far incomplete body of knowledge but also provide practical references for SMEs to be aware of the barriers. This simplifies avoiding them and successfully adopting crowdsourcing