An appreciative dialogue between East and West

In the context of globalized world, many countries have encountered similar changes and challenges. Learning from one another becomes critical to better understand the strengths and limitations of different theoretical and methodological approaches of education and adult education in particular. International and comparative education have historically demonstrated an effective way of learning from each other. Yet learning from each other seems to become very limited. Instead, learning from the West has become the norm due to its dominant economic position, a legacy of colonialism, the exportation of education, and the development of English as the lingua franca of scholarly publishing and interchange (Altbach, 2008)

Serial Integration, Real Innovation: Roles of Diverse Knowledge and Communicative Participation in Crowdsourcing

Despite a burgeoning public and scholarly interest on open innovation and crowdsourcing, how to enable members of online temporary crowd to maintain knowledge integration and innovation remains underexplored. This study seeks to understand the ways in which online crowd members collectively generate more innovative and serial integrative solutions to crowdsourced open innovation challenges. Analyzing 3,200 unique posts generated by 486 participants of 21 organization-sponsored online crowdsourcing innovation challenges, this research demonstrates that crowd members contribute more innovative solutions when being exposed to explicitly shared diverse knowledge, and that crowd members’ communicative participation acts as a catalyst for the production of both innovation and serial knowledge integration. Findings suggest that managers who seek to generate knowledge integration and innovation should endeavor to implement systems that afford high-level communicative participation, as well as encourage crowd members to make their diverse knowledge explicit while minimizing their cognitive load in knowledge sharing

Understanding Collective Reflection in Crowdsourcing for Innovation: A Semantic Network Approach

Empowered by the wisdom of crowds, innovation nowadays is increasingly relying on diverse individuals’ knowledge collaboration. Research on crowdsourcing and open innovation has demonstrated that through deliberate understanding and reflective thinking, members of the online crowd collectively manage their knowledge to generate innovative ideas. However, the semantic patterns of how online crowd’s collective reflection ultimately leads up to innovation remains unclear. Employing semantic network approach, this study analyzed a total of 1,116 posts contributed by online crowds responding to two organization-sponsored crowdsourcing open innovation challenges. Findings show that the semantic patterns of online crowds’ knowledge collaboration evolve from one phase to another in accordance with crowd members’ collective reflection on their diverse knowledge. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed

Integrative Solutions in Online Crowdsourcing Innovation Challenges

Online crowdsourcing challenges are widely used for problem-solving and innovation. Existing theory has characterized such challenges as tools for tapping distant knowledge. By building on information processing theory we move beyond this characterization and present a perspective that describes innovation challenges as virtual places in which ideas are not simply submitted or commented upon but knowledge is integrated. This perspective shifts the role of crowdsourcing challenges from mere tools for gathering ideas to representing the locus of innovation. Our perspective suggests that three types of knowledge affect the quality of integrative solutions: elementary ideas, facts, and analogical examples. Based on a large dataset, we find that elementary ideas and analogical examples are related to increased solution quality, while facts are related to decreased solution quality. We expand the research on online crowdsourcing innovation challenges to include how crowd participants influence the quality of solutions through the content of their postings