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Companies are discovering the power of crowdsourcing as a source of new ideas for products and services. It is assumed that the personal engagement and the continuous involvement with a company’s products or services over a period of several weeks positively affect participants’ loyalty intentions toward the host companies. The research leads the authors to challenge this assumption. In addition to mere participation in crowdsourcing initiatives, the authors argue that perceptions of fairness will explain changes in customer relationship-related consequences such as loyalty, perceived innovativeness and product interest. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors analyzed a real-life crowdsourcing contest launched by a leading lighting manufacturer and investigated the impact of two fairness dimensions (distributive and procedural) on participants’ future behavioral and attitudinal intentions (n=121). The analysis was performed with SEM.

The results suggest that fairness perceptions are significantly related to evoked product interest, perceived innovativeness and loyalty intentions. The analysis reveals that the influence of the fairness dimensions is asymmetric: while distributive fairness can be considered as a basic factor that must be fulfilled in order to avoid negative behavioral consequences, procedural fairness instead is an excitement factor that causes truly positive behavioral consequences.

The results are particularly relevant for companies launching a crowdsourcing competition under their own brand name, and for broadcasting platforms. For companies with no relations to end-users, these findings may not be as relevant.

Organizers of crowdsourcing contests should be aware that such initiatives can be a double-edged sword. Fair Play is a must to gain the positive effects from crowdsourcing initiatives for both new product development and the customer relationship. For companies lacking the capabilities to manage crowdsourcing initiatives professionally it is advisable to rely on intermediary broadcasting platforms.

The research is the first to investigate systematically the consequences of fairness perceptions in a real-life crowdsourcing idea contest. The authors demonstrate the asymmetric nature of fairness perceptions on three different outcome variables that are important for the customer relationship.

Virtual crowdsourcing initiatives, and in particular crowdsourcing competitions, have become a promising means of harnessing users’ creativity to help corporate innovation. To date, research has tended to focus on the outcome of the competition, i.e. on the creative solution. There is, however, a lack of understanding in such crowdsourcing environments of the creative process itself and the influence of social interaction on the platform during this process. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors conducted a series of qualitative interviews with participants from a major European crowdsourcing platform. The platform acts as an intermediary between companies and firms, and has launched more than 370 idea competitions.

The results suggest that there are not only positive interactions going on between participants. Below the surface, there also appear destructive processes provoked by the fierce competition among the contestants for prizes and a position in the Top Innovator lists. Such destructive behavior includes bullying of successful contestants, excessive use of like-functions among befriended contestants, and mutual donation of prize money among in-group members.

Negative social interaction among contestants of crowdsourcing communities can potentially threaten the platform provider’s business model. Managers of crowdsourcing platforms should engage in the development of strong social norms explicitly disapproving destructive behavior.

This study is the first to investigate in detail the phase of idea generation on crowdsourcing platforms, and the nature and impact of social interactions among contestants.

Service innovation is a key source of competence for service enterprises. Along with the emergence of crowdsourcing platforms, consumers are frequently involved in the process of service innovation. In this paper, the authors describe the crowdsourcing ideation website—MyStarbucksIdea.com—and find the motivations of customer-involved service innovation.

Using a rich data set obtained from the website MyStarbucksIdea.com, a dynamic structural model is proposed to illuminate the learning process of consumers.

The results indicate that initially individuals tend to underestimate the costs of the firm for implementing their ideas but overestimate the value of their ideas. By observing peer votes and feedbacks, individuals gradually learn about the true value of ideas, as well as the cost structure of the firm. Overall, the authors find that the cumulative feedback rate and the average potential of ideas will first increase and then decline.

First, the previous researches concerning the crowdsourcing show that the creative implementation rate is low and the number of creative ideas decreases, and few scholars have studied the causes behind the problems. Second, the data used in this paper are true and valid, and it is difficult to obtain now. These data can provide strong empirical support for the model proposed in this paper. Third, it is relatively novel to combine the customer learning mechanism and heterogeneity theory to explain the phenomenon of reduced creativity and low implementation rate in crowdsourcing platform, and the research results can provide a reasonable reference for the construction of this industry.

This paper presents NASA’s experience using a Center of Excellence (CoE) to scale and sustain an open innovation program as an effective problem-solving tool and includes strategic management recommendations for other organizations based on lessons learned.

This paper defines four phases of implementing an open innovation program: Learn, Pilot, Scale and Sustain. It provides guidance on the time required for each phase and recommendations for how to utilize a CoE to succeed. Recommendations are based upon the experience of NASA’s Human Health and Performance Directorate, and experience at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard running hundreds of challenges with research and development organizations.

Lessons learned include the importance of grounding innovation initiatives in the business strategy, assessing the portfolio of work to select problems most amenable to solving via crowdsourcing methodology, framing problems that external parties can solve, thinking strategically about early wins, selecting the right platforms, developing criteria for evaluation, and advancing a culture of innovation. Establishing a CoE provides an effective infrastructure to address both technical and cultural issues.

The NASA experience spanned more than seven years from initial learnings about open innovation concepts to the successful scaling and sustaining of an open innovation program; this paper provides recommendations on how to decrease this timeline to three years.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review the existing research and summarize the value co-creation mechanism between enterprises and users in crowdsource-based open innovation (COI).

Crowdsourcing is an effective means for enterprises to launch open innovation. This paper will first introduce the concepts and forms of open innovation and crowdsourcing, and then define COI.

This paper will analyze the key parties in innovative tasks, value co-creation mechanism that creates ideas, the interaction of key participants and the process of integrating internal and external resources to realize open innovation.

In the end, this paper will put forward the theoretical framework for future studies on the development of COI from the perspective of value co-creation.

This thesis will first introduce the concepts and forms of open innovation and outsourcing and then define COI. Then it will systematically review the existing research studies and summarize the value co-creation mechanism between enterprises and users under COI model by analyzing the key parties in innovative tasks, value co-creation mechanism that creates ideas, the interaction mode of key participants and the process of enterprises integrating internal and external resources to realize open innovation.

This study aimed at analyzing the factors that induce the intention of contribution by participants in crowdsourcing initiatives.

This study is an explanatory investigation using a quantitative approach. In the second stage, an exploratory study was carried out. Data were obtained through online questionnaires available to the contributors of two platforms, and results were obtained from a regression analysis.

The results revealed a greater importance given by participants to intrinsic motivational factors (learning, fun and satisfaction) compared with the extrinsic motivational factor (acknowledgment). Monetary rewards proved irrelevant in this process, whereas attitude and self-efficacy proved good predictors of the intention of contribution in crowdsourcing initiatives.

No study, as far as the authors’ knowledge extends, has been undertaken to understand what motivations are more relevant in the context of crowdsourcing platforms using multiple theories.

The purpose of this paper is to study the participation behaviors in the context of crowdsourcing projects from the perspective of gamification.

This paper first proposed a model to depict the effect of four categories of game elements on three types of motivation based upon several motivation theories, which may, in turn, influence user participation. Then, 5 × 2 between-subject Web experiments were designed for collecting data and validating this model.

Game elements which provide participants with rewards and recognitions or remind participants of the completion progress of their tasks may positively influence the extrinsic motivation, whereas game elements which can help create a fantasy scene may strengthen intrinsic motivation. Besides, recognition-kind and progress-kind game elements may trigger the internalization of extrinsic motivation. In addition, when a task is of high complexity, the effects from game elements on extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation will be less prominent, whereas the internalization of extrinsic motivation may benefit from the increase of task complexity.

This study may uncover the motivation mechanism of several different kinds of game elements, which may help to find which game elements are more effective in enhancing engagement and participation in crowdsourcing projects. Besides, as task complexity is used as a moderator, one may be able to identify whether task complexity is able to influence the effects from game elements on motivations. Last, but not the least, this study will indicate the interrelationship between game elements, individual motivation and user participation, which can be adapted by other scholars.

This paper aims to support small mobile application development teams or companies performing testing on a large variety of operating systems versions and mobile devices to ensure their seamless working.

This paper proposes a “hybrid crowdsourcing” method that leverages the power of public crowd testers. This leads to generating a novel crowdtesting workflow Developer/Tester- Crowdtesting (DT-CT) that focuses on developers and crowd testers as key elements in the testing process without the need for intermediate as managers or leaders. This workflow has been used in a novel crowdtesting platform (AskCrowd2Test). This platform enables testing the compatibility of mobile devices and applications at two different levels, high-level (device characteristics) or low-level (code). Additionally, a “crowd-powered knowledge base” has been developed that stores testing results, relevant issues and their solutions.

The comparison of the presented DT-CT workflow with the common and most recent crowdtesting workflows showed that DT-CT may positively impact the testing process by reducing time-consuming and budget spend because of the direct interaction of developers and crowd testers.

To authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to propose crowdtesting workflow based on developers and public crowd testers without crowd managers or leaders, which light the beacon for the future research in this field. Additionally, this work is the first that authorizes crowd testers with a limited level of experience to participate in the testing process, which helps in studying the behaviors and interaction of end-users with apps and obtains more concrete results.

The purpose of this paper is to assess, clarify and consolidate the terminology around the co-creation of services, establish its forms and identify its outcomes, to resolve the conceptual pluralism in service co-creation literature.

A focused literature review screened the articles published in five major service research journals to determine relevant contributions on the concept of co-creation of services. Then, a thematic analysis identifies the forms, themes and outcomes of co-creating services in the set of 80 qualifying articles.

The study reduces conceptual pluralism by establishing different forms of co-creating services and developing an explicit definition of co-creation in services. The authors develop an integrative framework that recognizes involvement, engagement and participation as prerequisites for co-creation. Relating to the different phases of the service process, the specific co-creation forms of co-ideation, co-valuation, co-design, co-testing and co-launching are classified as regenerative co-creation, while the specific co-creation forms of co-production and co-consumption are recognized as operative co-creation. Both beneficial and counterproductive outcomes of co-creation are identified and arranged into a typology.

The integrative framework illustrates that service providers and customers are involved, engaged and participate in co-creating services, which manifests in specific forms of co-creation; they attain beneficial and counterproductive outcomes (personal, social, hedonic, cognitive, economic and pragmatic); and are influenced by a contextual multi-actor network.

Co-creation in services is actionable; the typology of outcomes suggests service managers ways to motivate customers and employees to participate in co-creating services.

This paper defines and establishes the conceptual forms of co-creating services and the identified outcomes, and develops an integrative framework of co-creation in services.

The literature review aims to facilitate a broader understanding of on-demand service platform operations management and proposes potential research directions for scholars.

This study searches four databases for relevant literature on on-demand service platform operations management and selects 72 papers for this review. According to the research context, the literature can be divided into research on “a single platform” and research on “multiple platforms”. According to the research methods, the literature can be classified into “Mathematical Models”, “Empirical Studies”, “Multiple Methods” and “Literature Review”. Through comparative analysis, we identify research gaps and propose five future research agendas.

This paper proposes five research agendas for future research on on-demand service platform operations management. First, research can be done to combine classic research problems in the field of operations management with platform characteristics. Second, both the dynamic and steady-state issues of on-demand service platforms can be further explored. Third, research employing mathematical models and empirical analysis simultaneously can be more fruitful. Fourth, more research efforts on the various interactions among two or more platforms can be pursued. Last but not least, it is worthwhile to examine new models and paths that have emerged during the latest development of the platform economy.

Through categorizing the literature into two research contexts as well as classifying it according to four research methods, this article clearly shows the research progresses made so far in on-demand service platform operations management and provides future research directions.