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

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.

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