Traditionally, the term 'crowd' was used almost exclusively in the context of people who selforganized 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.
The increasing practice of engaging crowds, where organizations use IT to connect with dispersed individuals for explicit resource creation purposes, has precipitated the need to measure the precise processes and benefits of these activities over myriad different implementations. In this work, we seek to address these salient and non-trivial considerations by laying a foundation of theory, measures, and research methods that allow us to test crowdengagement efficacy across organizations, industries, technologies, and geographies. To do so, we anchor ourselves in the Theory of Crowd Capital, a generalizable framework for studying IT-mediated crowd-engagement phenomena, and put forth an empirical apparatus of testable measures and generalizable methods to begin to unify the field of crowd science.
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