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.
Author(s): Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 323
Tags: Popular Science In Business And Management
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxix
Front Matter ....Pages 1-1
What Is Crowdsourcing for Innovation? (Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra)....Pages 3-46
Our Research on Comparing Idea-Sharing Versus Unmindcuffing the Crowd (Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra)....Pages 47-76
Front Matter ....Pages 77-82
Practice 1: Minimally Committed Knowledge Baton Passers (Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra)....Pages 83-108
Practice 2: Crowds Offering a Variety of Types of Knowledge Are More Innovative Than Crowds Suggesting More Ideas (Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra)....Pages 109-134
Practice 3: Amplify Creative Associations of Knowledge Fragments (Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra)....Pages 135-163
Practice 4: Reconstructing Needs for Creative Associations (Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra)....Pages 165-200
Practice 5: Allowing the Crowd to Play Any Innovation-Enabling Roles They Choose (Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra)....Pages 201-221
Front Matter ....Pages 223-224
Tying It All Together: A Theory of Collective Production of Innovation to Inspire Future Research (Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra)....Pages 225-249
Designing Technology Platforms for Collective Co-Production: Advice When Selecting Crowdsourcing Platforms (Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra)....Pages 251-264
Unleashing the Crowd: Overcoming the Managerial Challenges (Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra)....Pages 265-293
What’s the Future? Managing Organizations as Crowds Enabled by Super-Connectivity and Big Data (Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra)....Pages 295-297
Back Matter ....Pages 299-302
