Absorbing knowledge in the digital age: the key role of integration mechanisms in the context of crowdsourcing for innovation

Abstract

The digital age offers unprecedented opportunities for firms to access new knowledge for innovation. Both academics and managers have identified crowdsourcing (CS) as one relevant way to do so. CS for innovation involves outsourcing problem-solving or creative tasks to the crowd. To benefit from CS, absorptive capacity (ACAP) is critical; this can be enhanced by prior knowledge and past experience with a partner. However, in the CS context, firms open themselves up to undefined, anonymous partners through the Internet, hence the development of ACAP becomes more difficult. The literature on ACAP describes how internal integration mechanisms encourage the absorption of knowledge but fails to clearly address the way in which uncommon knowledge is integrated. Although literature has acknowledged the beneficial role of a wider spectrum of influential internal and external mechanisms on uncommon knowledge, few empirical studies have addressed the distinctive effect of these mechanisms on the absorption of anonymous partners' knowledge. To fill this gap, this study identifies relevant integration mechanisms and how they impact upon different ACAP dimensions in the CS context. Five case studies reveal the distinctive influence of integration mechanisms depending on the nature of the CS activity. Our results extend research on ACAP in the little studied digital open context, investigating the absorption of uncommon knowledge from unidentified partners. From a managerial perspective, this study shows that managers need to pay attention to integration mechanisms in order to support the absorption of knowledge from the crowd. More precisely, our study suggests that the main focus should not be on external mechanisms, but also on internal mechanisms. Finally, we open up a new theoretical debate on how these mechanisms should be combined.

Exploring open innovation in the digital age: A maturity model and future research directions

“…Not only can digital technologies and social networks help to easily identify appropriate knowledge owners and collaboration partners within companies or organizations, but additionally enables to access and integrate large numbers of diverse and dispersed external unknown individuals. See for example in this special issue Ruiz et al (2020) who are investigating how knowledge absorption in the digital age takes place by studying the key role of integration mechanisms in the context of crowdsourcing. However, as Mack and Landau (2020) point out in their paper, the submission quality crowsourcing contests vary depending on individual-level determinants like their level of domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant processes, and extrinsic task motivation.…”

Understanding crowdsourcing projects: A review on the key design elements of a crowdsourcing initiative

“…Recent crowdsourcing research therefore increasingly focuses on the absorptive capacity of organizations in the context of crowdsourcing (e.g. Afuah & Tucci, 2012; Boons & Stam, 2019; Gassenheimer et al, 2013; Ruiz et al, 2020).…”

Research on the Relationships Among Customer Participation, Knowledge Integration and New Product Development Performance

“…Through the integration of new and old internal and external knowledge, enterprises can increase the possibility of recombination of knowledge elements and form enterprise-specific tacit knowledge, thereby promoting the establishment of sustainable competitive advantages [12]. And the stronger the ability of knowledge integration is, the higher the efficiency of knowledge circulation in an organization will be, which is conducive to the accurate evaluation and utilization of the acquired knowledge by an enterprise, thus effectively reducing the uncertainty in the NPD process and improving the enterprise performance [13]. That is, customer participation can provide more knowledge sources for product innovation, and knowledge integration can help enterprises to explore, absorb and use more redundant new knowledge, increase knowledge reserves, and then improve NPD performance.…”

“…A study by Dai et al [17] showed that absorptive capacity positively moderates the relationship between customer participation and innovation performance, and enterprises can use their strong absorptive capacity to dig deep into customer knowledge and provide necessary knowledge sources for NPD. From the perspective of knowledge management, under the limited resource environment, enterprises with stronger absorptive capacity can acquire, absorb and utilize customer knowledge more effectively and tap into valuable knowledge to enrich the original knowledge base, accelerate the formation of ideas and the NPD process, and thus improve the innovation capability of enterprises [13]. From the perspective of technological capabilities, absorptive capacity is an important tool for acquiring and processing customer knowledge when customers are involved in NPD activities.…”