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How Organizations Manage Crowds: Define, Broadcast, Attract, and Select

Linus Dahlander

Lars Bo Jeppesen

Henning Piezunka

Managing Inter-organizational Collaborations: Process Views

ISBN: 978-1-78756-592-0, eISBN: 978-1-78756-591-3

Publication date: 4 October 2019

Abstract

Crowdsourcing – a form of collaboration across organizational boundaries – provides access to knowledge beyond an organization’s local knowledge base. Integrating work on organization theory and innovation, the authors first develop a framework that characterizes crowdsourcing into a main sequential process, through which organizations (1) define the task they wish to have completed; (2) broadcast to a pool of potential contributors; (3) attract a crowd of contributors; and (4) select among the inputs they receive. For each of these phases, the authors identify the key decisions organizations make, provide a basic explanation for each decision, discuss the trade-offs organizations face when choosing among decision alternatives, and explore how organizations may resolve these trade-offs. Using this decision-centric approach, the authors continue by showing that there are fundamental interdependencies in the process that makes the coordination of crowdsourcing challenging.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments

All authors contributed equally. We are grateful for comments and suggestions from editors Jörg Sydow and Hans Berends as well as Kevin Boudreau, Henrich Greve, Karim Lakhani,Woody Powell, Phanish Puranam, and Ammon Salter, as well as seminar participants at the Open and User Innovation Conference in Brighton 2013, the AOM Conference in Philadelphia 2014, the Crowdsourcing Workshop at INSEAD 2016, the Vinnova conference on prize competitions in Stockholm, and the INSEAD Entrepreneurship Forum 2016. The usual disclaimer applies.

Citation

Dahlander, L., Jeppesen, L.B. and Piezunka, H. (2019), "How Organizations Manage Crowds: Define, Broadcast, Attract, and Select", Sydow, J. and Berends, H. (Ed.) Managing Inter-organizational Collaborations: Process Views (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Vol. 64), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 239-270. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20190000064016

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited