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Crowdsourcing Innovation  

Linus Dahlander and Henning Piezunka

Crowdsourcing—a form of collaboration across organizational boundaries—provides access to knowledge beyond an organization’s local knowledge base. There are four basic steps to crowdsourcing: (a) define a problem, (b) broadcast the problem to an audience of potential solvers, (c) take actions to attract solutions, and (d) select from the set of submitted ideas. To successfully innovate via crowdsourcing, organizations must complete all these steps. Each step requires an organization to make various decisions. For example, organizations need to decide whether its selection is made internally. Organizations must take into account interdependencies among these four steps. For example, the choice between qualitative and quantitative selection mechanisms affects how widely organizations should broadcast a problem and how many solutions they should attract. Organizations must make many decisions, and they must take into account the many interdependencies in each key step.

Article

Citizen Science and Crowd Science  

Marion K. Poetz and Henry Sauermann

Citizen science and crowd science (CS) projects involve members of the public who participate in response to an open call and who can perform a broad range of research tasks. Scholars using the citizen science lens focus on the fact that many participants do not have formal scientific training, while scholars using the crowd science lens emphasize that participants are often recruited through an open call. CS projects have resulted in large-scale data sets, novel discoveries, and top-tier publications (i.e., scientific impact), but they can also have large societal and practical impacts by increasing the relevance of research or accomplishing other objectives such as science education and building awareness. The diverse landscape of CS projects reflects five underlying paradigms that capture different rationales for involving crowds and that require different organizational setups: crowd volume, broadcast search, user crowds, community production, and crowd wisdom. Within each CS project, the breadth of crowd involvement can be mapped along stages of the research process (e.g., formulating research questions, designing methods, collecting data). Within each stage, the depth of crowd involvement can be mapped with respect to four general types of contributions: activities, knowledge, resources, and decisions. Common challenges of CS projects relate to recruiting and engaging participants, organizational design, resource requirements, and ensuring the quality of contributions. Opportunities for future research include research on the costs and boundary conditions of CS as well as systematic assessments of different aspects of performance and how they relate to project characteristics. Future research should also investigate the role of artificial intelligence both as worker who can take over tasks from crowd members and as manager who can help organize CS activities.

Article

User Innovation  

Nikolaus Franke and Christian Lüthje

Users of products and services, be they user firms or consumers, frequently develop innovations for their own benefit. Such user innovation is a long-existing phenomenon, but it has gained much momentum in the new millennium. The Internet has greatly facilitated connections between creative users, and at the same time cost-effective design and prototyping technologies are making it increasingly feasible for users to develop their own products and services. Users have been found to innovate mainly because they want solutions that best serve their own needs. In general, their innovation activities involve no expectations of monetary profit, being motivated rather by self-rewards (such as fun, positive feelings of altruism, signaling of competence to the community of peers). This explains why users are typically willing to share their innovations without requiring payment. A problem of user innovation is that, since the benefit that others could gain is an externality for users, they lack strong incentives to invest in the active diffusion of their innovations. The consequence of this “diffusion shortfall” is social welfare losses. There are several ways in which producers and service providers can help overcome these problems and benefit from the innovation potential of users at the same time. They can apply the lead user method to actively search for a small group of particularly highly motivated and qualified users, they can outsource product design work to their users via user design toolkits, and they can broadcast innovation challenges to an appropriate crowd of external problem solvers.