Exploring Barriers and Opportunities in Adopting Crowdsourcing Based New Product Development in Manufacturing SMEs

Crowdsourcing is an innovative business practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content or even funds by soliciting contributions from a large group of people (the ‘Crowd’). The potential benefits of utilizing crowdsourcing in product design are well-documented, but little research exists on what are the barriers and opportunities in adopting crowdsourcing in new product development (NPD) of manufacturing SMEs. In order to answer the above questions, a Proof of Market study is carried out on crowdsourcing-based product design under an Innovate UK funded Smart project, which aims at identifying the needs, challenges and future development opportunities associated with adopting crowdsourcing strategies for NPD. The research findings from this study are reported here and can be used to guide future development of crowdsourcing-based collaborative design methods and tools and provide some practical references for industry to adopt this new and emerging collaborative design method in their business

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

Consumers’ Non-Participation in Creative Crowdsourcing: Exploration Through the Lenses of Meaning of Work: An Abstract

Crowdsourcing is the consumers’ participation at the accomplishment of a task, traditionally performed by the internal employees (Howe 2006). Examples are proposing innovative ideas, contributing to product development or solving complex problems. Consumers may also engage in creative tasks (e.g., ad creation, logo design, packaging design), which constitutes the popular practice of creative crowdsourcing. The value and success of a creative crowdsourcing initiative require attracting sufficient numbers of participants (Hopkins 2011). This remains a persistent issue (Faullant et al. 2016): the majority of the crowd does not participate. If crowdsourcers are to be considered as workers (Cova and Dalli 2009; Rieder and Voß 2010), they must be managed and motivated. Traditional management principles, such as recruitment, hierarchy, and internal coordination, might not apply here. Therefore, this research addresses a pressing question: why may people be reluctant to participate in creative crowdsourcing and what might encourage them to participate? As the crowd is heterogenous, composed of professionals/experts in the creative tasks and others, rather ordinary/amateur consumers (Brabham 2008, 2012), this research examines the meaning that potential participants, both creative professionals and ordinary consumers, assign to their nonparticipation. To this aim, we mobilize the theoretical framework of the meaning of work (Rosso et al. 2010) borrowed from human resources literature. Rosso et al. (2010, p. 94–95) define meaning as “the output of having made sense of something.” The meaning of work not only influences work motivation but also affects other critical organizational outcomes, such as engagement, empowerment, individual performance, and personal fulfilment (Steger et al. 2013). The results of our qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 19 ordinary consumers and 14 professionals from the creative sector, highlight different reasons for nonparticipation. Creative professionals express clear meanings underlying their nonparticipation decision. Their discourse highlights a resistance to current creative crowdsourcing practices, whether individually and/or collectively (Peñaloza and Price 1993), such that they “rant” and initiate expressive actions (Hirschman 1970), encouraging “general boycotts” of these practices. Ordinary consumers’ nonparticipation can be better explained by an inability to meet their expectations or a perceived lack of competences. This absence of willingness to participate might signal a perceived lack of work/activity meaning or a perceived lack of value creation for themselves. Current research limitations are delineated and implications for researchers and practitioners are further offered. These results should also encourage organizations to adapt their recruitment activities, based on the different crowd groups

Consumers’ Non-Participation in Creative Crowdsourcing: Exploration through the Lenses of Meaning of Work

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