Source-linked AI summary
How to Work a Crowd: Developing Crowd Capital Through Crowdsourcing
J. Prpic, P. P. Shukla, J. H. Kietzmann, I. P. McCarthy
TL;DR
Managers lack a clear framework for understanding how different crowdsourcing forms create organizational value. The paper develops a crowdsourcing typology and a three-stage crowd capital model, showing how firms construct crowds, acquire and assimilate resources, and harness difficult-to-replicate crowd capital.
Problem
Managers lack a clear understanding of crowdsourcing’s forms, value, and engagement processes, making resource allocation and strategy development difficult.
Method
The paper combines a four-category crowdsourcing typology with a three-stage model covering crowd construction, capability development, and crowd-capital harnessing.
Results
The framework identifies acquisition and assimilation capabilities as the means for obtaining crowd resources and aligning them with organizational processes.
Takeaways & Limitations
The typology and capability framework gives executives decision areas for selecting crowdsourcing approaches and engaging crowds through IT.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
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, the use of information technologies to outsource business responsibilities to crowds, can now significantly influence a firms 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 (knowledge, labor, funds) from the crowd. Step three addresses key decision-areas that executives need to address to effectively engage crowds.
1. Crowds and Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing engages distributed crowds through information technologies, but executives lack a unified framework for understanding crowd forms, value, and engagement processes. The paper addresses this gap by organizing crowdsourcing alternatives and introducing a framework for recognizing and assimilating crowd-derived resources.
- 1. Crowds and Crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing enables organizations to engage distributed individuals for innovation and problem-solving needs.Information technologies support outsourcing business responsibilities and accessing contributions from dispersed crowds.
- 1. Crowds and Crowdsourcing: Executives face unclear crowdsourcing options because academic and practitioner literatures lack a unifying framework for crowd engagement.This uncertainty concerns the forms crowds can take and the value they can offer.
- 1. Crowds and Crowdsourcing: The paper provides an overview of crowdsourcing types and introduces a crowd capital framework for recognizing and assimilating crowd information.It also discusses benefits and advice for effectively engaging crowds.
2. Types of crowdsourcing
The paper classifies crowdsourcing by the contribution sought and how contributions are processed, yielding four forms: crowd voting, micro-task, idea, and solution crowdsourcing. These alternatives can also be combined into a crowdsourcing mix tailored to organizational needs.
- 2. Types of crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing varies by whether contributions are objective or subjective and whether organizations aggregate or filter them.Objective contributions seek facts, while subjective contributions seek collective judgments, opinions, perceptions, or beliefs.
- 2. Types of crowdsourcing: Crowd voting aggregates subjective responses to support organizational decisions.Participants submit preferences, which are tallied collectively.
- 2. Types of crowdsourcing: Micro-task crowdsourcing divides large or complex work into smaller tasks that crowds can complete more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently.Examples include assembling datasets, labeling photos, translating documents, and transcribing audio.
- 2. Types of crowdsourcing: Idea crowdsourcing solicits creative contributions that organizations filter before selecting ideas for implementation.Threadless, for example, asks its crowd for T-shirt designs and internally selects designs for production.
- 2. Types of crowdsourcing: Solution crowdsourcing presents a well-defined problem and evaluates submitted solutions using tests or measurements.Netflix tested competing solutions for improving movie-preference prediction accuracy.
- 2. Types of crowdsourcing: Organizations can implement different crowdsourcing types simultaneously or in complementary sequence as a crowdsourcing mix.The appropriate combination depends on organizational needs and goals.
3. A crowd capital perspective
Crowd capital is an organizational resource acquired through a deliberate process of constructing a crowd, developing crowd capabilities, and harnessing crowd-derived resources. The framework links crowd design and acquisition processes to hard-to-replicate resources and competitive advantage.
- 3. A crowd capital perspective: Crowd capital consists of organizational resources acquired through crowdsourcing, including knowledge, funds, and opinions.The paper presents it as a top-down process for seeking bottom-up resources from crowds.
- 3. A crowd capital perspective: The process model has three stages: constructing a crowd, developing crowd capabilities, and harnessing crowd capital.Crowds generally need to be deliberately constructed rather than assumed to pre-exist.
- 3.1. Constructing a crowd: Crowd construction requires aligning the engagement purpose with organizational goals and identifying where necessary contributions can be found.Crowds may include employees or selected subsets of an organization’s broader community.
- 3.2. Developing crowd capabilities: Crowd capability comprises acquisition and assimilation: obtaining dispersed resources and aligning crowd contributions with internal processes.The framework adapts these capabilities from absorptive capacity theory.
- 3.2.1. Acquisition capabilities: Acquisition capability requires choosing interaction patterns and IT structures suited to obtaining useful external resources.Interactions may involve collaboration or autonomous task completion, with implications for incentives and technology.
- 3.2.1. Acquisition capabilities: Firms can use web-based intermediaries to access established pools of micro-task labor or participants for idea and solution crowdsourcing.Examples include M-Turk, CrowdFlower, Samasource, Innocentive, Eyeka, and Kaggle.
- 3.3. Harnessing crowd capital: Goal-focused crowd capital is hard for competitors to replicate, particularly when organizations filter subjective contributions into unique resources.The paper links this distinctiveness to potential competitive advantages.
- 3.3. Harnessing crowd capital: Crowd capital can be generated without collaboration or continuous participation, reducing the investment needed to obtain it.Organizations can choose encounter-based, relationship-based, or combined crowd capabilities.
4. Final thoughts on how to work a crowd
The article frames crowd capital as a resource developed through crowd construction, acquisition, and assimilation capabilities. It translates this framework into decision areas for executives and argues that dispersed knowledge can support competitive advantage.
- 4. Final thoughts on how to work a crowd: The crowd capital perspective models how firms construct crowds and acquire and assimilate resources from them.The framework is intended to distinguish capabilities needed for different crowdsourcing types and forms of crowd capital.
- 4. Final thoughts on how to work a crowd: Executives can use the crowd typology to match business problems with the types of responses crowdsourcing will produce.The typology distinguishes problems by the content sought and by whether contributions are aggregated or filtered.
- 4. Final thoughts on how to work a crowd: Acquisition and assimilation capabilities provide IT structures and engagement options for developing crowdsourcing initiatives.The article presents these capabilities as practical dimensions for decision makers and their strategic development of crowdsourcing.
- 4. Final thoughts on how to work a crowd: Generating crowd capital requires deciding what content to acquire, what crowd to construct, and how information technology will engage members.Relevant choices include subjective versus objective solutions, internal versus external members, collaboration versus autonomy, and making, buying, or renting IT structures.
- 4. Final thoughts on how to work a crowd: New technologies improve firms’ access to dispersed knowledge, making crowdsourcing relevant to everyday problems and organizational strategies.The article argues that this access can extend into underlying business models and contribute to creating and sustaining competitive advantage.