Unleashing the Crowd

This book disrupts the way practitioners and academic scholars think about crowds, crowdsourcing, innovation, and new organizational forms in this emerging period of ubiquitous access to the internet. The authors argue that the current approach to crowdsourcing unnecessarily limits the crowd to offering ideas, locking out those of us with knowledge about a problem. They use data from 25 case studies of flash crowds anonymous strangers answering online announcements to participate in a 7-10 day innovation challenge half of whom were unleashed from the limitations of focusing on ideas. Yet, these crowds were able to develop new business models, new product lines, and offer useful solutions to global problems in fields as diverse as health care insurance, software development, and societal change. This book, which offers a theory of collective production of innovative solutions explaining the practices that the crowds organically followed, will revolutionize current assumptions about how innovation and crowdsourcing should be managed for commercial as well as societal purposes.

Demonstrates how innovative and useful solutions can be generated by crowds of people who spend only minutes, receive minimal financial incentives, use relatively simple technology platforms and have little in common with each other Examines how to encourage knowledge sharing without creating apprehension of losing intellectual property Offers a new approach to engage crowds of diverse people in solving the big problems of a company, a neighbourhood, or a society.

Autorentext

Ann Majchrzak is Chaired Professor of Business Administration and Digital Innovation at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, USA. She is an internationally-known scholar in the fields of management, organization science, and information systems, as well as publishing in top practitioner journals. This is her fourth book.

Arvind Malhotra is H. Allen Andrews Professor of Entrepreneurial Education and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. He is an expert on innovation processes, inter-organizational knowledge management, and virtual teams having published in many top-tier academic and practice oriented journals.

Inhalt

1. What is Crowdsourcing for Innovation?.- 2. Our Research on Comparing Idea Sharing.- 3. Practice #1: Minimally Committed Knowledge Baton Passers.- 4. Practice #2: Crowds Offering a Variety of Types of Knowledge Are More Innovative Than Crowds Suggesting More Ideas.- 5. Practice #3: Amplify Creative Associations of Knowledge Fragments.- 6. Practice #4: Reconstructing Needs for Creative Associations.- 7. Practice #5: Allowing the Crowd to Play Any Innovation-Enabling They Choose.- 8. Tying it All Together: A Theory of Collective Production of Innovation to Inspire Future Research.- 9. Designing Technology Platforms for Collective Co-Production: Advice When Selecting Crowdsourcing Platforms.- 10. Unleashing the Crowd: Overcoming the Managerial Challenges.- 11. Final Words: What's the Future: Managing Organizations as Crowds Enabled by Super-Connectivity and Big Data.