How to work a crowd: Developing crowd capital through crowdsourcing

doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2014.09.005

Business Horizons

Volume 58, Issue 1, January–February 2015, Pages 77-85

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2014.09.005 Get rights and content

Abstract

Traditionally, the term ‘crowd’ was used almost exclusively in the context of people who self-organized around a common purpose, emotion, or experience. Today, however, firms often refer to crowds in discussions of how collections of individuals can be engaged for organizational purposes. Crowdsourcing—defined here as the use of information technologies to outsource business responsibilities to crowds—can now significantly influence a firm's ability to leverage previously unattainable resources to build competitive advantage. Nonetheless, many managers are hesitant to consider crowdsourcing because they do not understand how its various types can add value to the firm. In response, we explain what crowdsourcing is, the advantages it offers, and how firms can pursue crowdsourcing. We begin by formulating a crowdsourcing typology and show how its four categories—crowd voting, micro-task, idea, and solution crowdsourcing—can help firms develop ‘crowd capital,’ an organizational-level resource harnessed from the crowd. We then present a three-step process model for generating crowd capital. Step one includes important considerations that shape how a crowd is to be constructed. Step two outlines the capabilities firms need to develop to acquire and assimilate resources (e.g., knowledge, labor, funds) from the crowd. Step three outlines key decision areas that executives need to address to effectively engage crowds.

Section snippets

Crowds and crowdsourcing

Not too long ago, the term ‘crowd’ was used almost exclusively in the context of people who self-organized around a common purpose, emotion, or experience. Crowds were sometimes seen as a positive occurrence—for instance, when they formed for political rallies or to support sports teams—but were more often associated negatively with riots, a mob mentality, or looting. Under today's lens, they are viewed more positively (Wexler, 2011). Crowds have become useful!

It all started in 2006, when

Types of crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing as an online, distributed problem-solving model (Brabham, 2008) suggests that approaching crowds and asking for contributions can help organizations develop solutions to a variety of business challenges. In this context, the crowd is often treated as a single construct: a general collection of people that can be _targeted by firms. However, just as organizations and their problems vary, so do the types of crowds and the different kinds of contributions they can offer the firm. The

A crowd capital perspective

For any and all of the aforementioned initiatives, firms build crowd capital: organizational resources acquired through crowdsourcing. But this does not happen by accident; crowd capital is gained when the organization develops and follows a top-down process to seek bottom-up resources (e.g., knowledge, funds, opinions) from a crowd (Aitamurto et al., 2011, Prpic and Shukla, 2013). In this section, we present this process as a three-stage model—constructing a crowd, developing crowd

Final thoughts on how to work a crowd

This article offers contributions to both the research and practitioner communities. We hope that our typology—separating crowdsourcing by the subjective or objective content obtained from the crowd, and then either aggregated or filtered by the organization—will help scholars develop lenses appropriate for research on crowd voting, micro-task crowdsourcing, idea crowdsourcing, and solution crowdsourcing, respectively. Herein, we present the crowd capital perspective (which illustrates in

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Information technology is being increasingly employed to harness under-utilized resources via more effective coordination. This progress has manifested in different developments, for instance, crowdsourcing (e.g. Wikipedia, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and Waze), crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and RocketHub) or the sharing economy (e.g. Uber, Airbnb, and Didi Chuxing). Since the sustainability of these IT-enabled forms of resource coordination do not commonly rely merely on direct economic benefits of the participants, but also on other non-monetary, intrinsic gratifications, such systems are increasingly gamified that is, designers use features of games to induce enjoyment and general autotelicy of the activity. However, a key problem in gamification design has been whether it is better to use competition-based or cooperation-based designs. We examine this question through a field experiment in a gamified crowdsourcing system, employing three versions of gamification: competitive, cooperative, and inter-team competitive gamification. We study these gamified conditions’ effects on users’ perceived enjoyment and usefulness of the system as well as on their behaviors (system usage, crowdsourcing participation, engagement with the gamification feature, and willingness to recommend the crowdsourcing application). The results reveal that inter-team competitions are most likely to lead to higher enjoyment and crowdsourcing participation, as well as to a higher willingness to recommending a system. Further, the findings indicate that designers should consider cooperative instead of competitive approaches to increase users’ willingness to recommend crowdsourcing systems. These insights add relevant findings to the ongoing discourse on the roles of different types of competitions in gamification designs and suggest that crowdsourcing system designers and operators should implement gamification with competing teams instead of typically used competitions between individuals.
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Citation Excerpt :
In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review, overview, and future outlook on the usage and study of gamification in crowdsourcing systems. We first provide an integrated conceptual framework for gamified crowdsourcing systems (Fig. 3), based on the extant literature on crowdsourcing (Geiger and Schader, 2014; Prpić et al., 2015) and gamification (Hamari et al., 2014; Seaborn and Fels 2015). This framework remedies existing conceptual hurdles and scantness in how gamification, crowdsourcing, and their combinations are generally perceived, and acts both as a framework to direct this review and as an anchor point for further studies.
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How to work a crowd: Developing crowd capital through crowdsourcing

Abstract

Section snippets

Crowds and crowdsourcing

Types of crowdsourcing

A crowd capital perspective

Final thoughts on how to work a crowd

International Journal of Forecasting

Business Horizons

Long Range Planning

Business Horizons

The Journal of Strategic Information Systems

The Journal of Strategic Information Systems

Business Horizons

Business Horizons

Business Horizons

Crowdsourcing as a solution to distant search

Academy of Management Review

The promise of idea crowdsourcing: Benefits, contexts, limitations

Value creation in e-business

Strategic Management Journal

InnoCentive positions itself as a challenge marketplace

The promise of prediction markets

Science

Blogging America: The new public sphere

Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage

Journal of Management

Lessons from the Netflix Prize Challenge

SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter

Massive multiplayer human computation for fun, money, and survival

Using the crowd as an innovation partner

Harvard Business Review

Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: An introduction and cases

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

Moving the crowd at Threadless

Information Communication Society

Crowdsourcing: A model for leveraging online communities

Amazon's Mechanical Turk a new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data?

Perspectives on Psychological Science

E-participation and transparent policy decision making

Information Polity

Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game

Nature