<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>All kinds of organizations have tapped into crowds to find individuals who can help them solve problems and develop innovations. Crowdsourcing makes it possible to attract a highly diverse audience that approaches innovation challenges from new angles. To develop groundbreaking innovations, companies are after exceptional ideas – and those are more likely to be found in large crowds rather than small internal groups. Furthermore, participants in crowd projects select the challenges they are really interested in themselves, due to which their motivation and engagement levels tend to be high. In collaborative crowdsourcing projects, new and better ideas can emerge when crowds share information freely, build on other ideas and are able to accumulate and recombine different concepts.</p>
<p>Despite these advantages there are risks: costs and effort might be underestimated, or organizations might fail to control their crowds. And the crowd can sometimes also be wrong. Managers need to carefully analyze which solutions they seek and whether their problems can be solved through crowdsourcing. Not all innovation needs are suitable for open innovation, but crowdsourcing can have remarkable success if applied wisely to the right challenges.</p> 
</abstract>

All kinds of organizations have tapped into crowds to find individuals who can help them solve problems and develop innovations. Crowdsourcing makes it possible to attract a highly diverse audience that approaches innovation challenges from new angles. To develop groundbreaking innovations, companies are after exceptional ideas – and those are more likely to be found in large crowds rather than small internal groups. Furthermore, participants in crowd projects select the challenges they are really interested in themselves, due to which their motivation and engagement levels tend to be high. In collaborative crowdsourcing projects, new and better ideas can emerge when crowds share information freely, build on other ideas and are able to accumulate and recombine different concepts.
Despite these advantages there are risks: costs and effort might be underestimated, or organizations might fail to control their crowds. And the crowd can sometimes also be wrong. Managers need to carefully analyze which solutions they seek and whether their problems can be solved through crowdsourcing. Not all innovation needs are suitable for open innovation, but crowdsourcing can have remarkable success if applied wisely to the right challenges.

Crowd Innovation: The Philosopher’s Stone, a Silver Bullet, or Pandora’s Box?

NIM Marketing Intelligence Review

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

All kinds of organizations have tapped into crowds to find individuals who can help them solve problems and develop innovations. Crowdsourcing makes it...

Crowd Innovation: The Philosopher’s Stone, a Silver Bullet, or Pandora’s Box?

Published Online: Apr 24, 2020

Page range: 10 - 17

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/nimmir-2020-0002

Keywords
Crowdsourcing, Innovation, Open Collaboration, Contests, Outliers

© 2020 Kurt Matzler, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Crowd Innovation: The Philosopher’s Stone, a Silver Bullet, or Pandora’s Box?

Published Online: Apr 24, 2020

Page range: 10 - 17

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/nimmir-2020-0002

KeywordsCrowdsourcing, Innovation, Open Collaboration, Contests, Outliers

© 2020 Kurt Matzler, published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Keywords
Crowdsourcing, Innovation, Open Collaboration, Contests, Outliers