IRS Patrick Pollok
Thursday, 8 May 2014, 4pm, TIM Social Area
Building capabilities for intermediary mediated crowdsourcing: A microfoundational perspective
This paper presents the findings of a study aimed at investigating organizational factors affecting the ability of firms to benefit from intermediary mediated crowdsourcing. Testing hypotheses on a sample of 365 companies, we find that the availability of the right internal structures, key individuals, and processes represent microfoundations of crowdsourcing capability and are thus crucial to capture value from problem broadcasting. Our findings suggest that crowdsourcing projects are not comparable to a simple outsourcing of internal development tasks. Instead, intermediary mediated crowdsourcing has to be understood as a non-trivial process involving multiple stakeholders and requiring significant channel specific resource investments.