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While the benefits of open innovation (OI) and crowdsourcing (CS) for solutions to R&D problems have been widely promoted in the last ten years, their appropriateness for organisations specialising in providing R&D services has not been explicitly considered. This paper aims to examine an R&D organisation's response to increased adoption of OI and CS, highlight their drawbacks in this context, and analyse how and why the alternative of problem‐sourcing (PS) proved more effective.

The paper provides an in‐depth documentation and analysis of an initiative called: The “What's Your Problem New Zealand?” (WYPNZ) challenge. The use of a single case and qualitative approach allows the development of an illustrative, rich description and is suited to studying unique and novel events.

In the context of professional R&D organisations, a range of benefits of CS for R&D problems rather than solutions were identified, including generating a potential pipeline of projects and clients as well as avoiding the challenge to the professional status of the organisation's research capability. An unexpected side‐effect was that the reputation of the research organisation as open, accessible and helpful was greatly enhanced. The success of the PS approach to CS for R&D provides insight into how some of the pitfalls of OI/CS can be better understood and potentially managed.

The PS model provided by the “WYPNZ” initiative represents a new strategic possibility for R&D organisations that complements their traditional competencies by drawing on the openness that OI and CS seek to leverage. As such, it can provide insights for other organisations wishing to make use of the connectivity afforded by OI/CS in an alternative mode to that typically in use and reported in the literature.

The Astroworld concert tragedy is used as an example of crisis (mis)management and the potential utility of the 4R model. Although the 4R model has been implemented in high-risk emergency management situations, it is useful in the PR field because of its actionable approach, creating a way for practitioners to prepare for and manage crisis situations.

This is an analysis of the crisis that occurred at Astroworld, spanning preparation, day-of events, casualties and enduring reputational impact. The paper applies the 4R method to the Astroworld tragedy to show how it could have lessened or even prevented the tragedy. Finally, the SCCT model is used to explain why the official post-crisis statements were ineffective.

Social media has heightened the importance of a quick and effective organizational response to risk and crisis situations because poor responses can go viral quickly. However, social media also provides intelligence and crowd sourced information that can inform PR practitioners of emerging crisis scenarios. It is also an underutilized tool for two-way communication during crises.

The 4R approach is beneficial to general practitioners as it simplifies crisis best-practices, something essential for quick action. As our world changes and becomes less predictable, practitioners must have a clear plan to protect their organizations and the public surrounding them. This approach includes reduction, readiness, response and recovery, which are all essential in crisis communication.

The 4R method has not been explored or applied in the PR field. This paper highlights how the model has been utilized in the emergency management field and illustrates the way 4R can serve the PR field.

For at least three decades, inter-organizational collaboration (IOC) has attracted scholarly attention and many studies have unveiled its inner dynamics. More recently, new phenomena have appeared in the changing landscape of IOC, affecting the way in which organizations are open to interact with, and rely upon, other actors that may be standalone entities as well as representatives of other organizations. These actors operate “betwixt and between” the organizational core and its external environment(s), populating a liminal space located at the organization’s boundary in which activities take place according to non-proprietary and non-employment logics. The authors focus on the forms of collaboration, which blur the lines between organizations, calling into question the fundamental label of crowd-focused IOCs. The authors consider two forms: crowd-open and crowd-based organizations. The authors show the organizational design impact of openness spans from the mere scalability associated with organizational growth to the phenomena of reshaping formalization and standardization of roles and processes, and self-organizing over time.

Crowded urban regions pose a complex urban challenge that can adversely affect urban residents, encompassing aspects like mental and physical well-being, overall livability and quality of life. The complexity in determining the factors influencing the crowding perception, which encompass subjective and situational psychological factors alongside physical and environmental attributes, imparts ambiguity to planners' approach. This study aims to unravel the intricate interplay between crowding and the physical attributes inherent in the built environment.

This literature review analyses theories linking urban planning and environmental psychology to uncover gaps in the relationship between urban design principles and residents' perceptions of crowding. It also explores influential variables affecting crowding perception and diverse methodologies across contexts.

The study built upon a broad literature review which is expected to summarise and classify the variables of urban planning components and approaches according to their impacts on the psychological perception of crowding. Furthermore, highlighting a number of recommendations that can be considered a guide for planners and urban designers to enhance the urban experience and reduce the perception of crowding.

This study seeks to improve the overall experience of crowding in densely populated urban areas. It accomplishes this by identifying influential factors and comprehending the associated outcomes in such contexts. Furthermore, it bridges perspectives from various fields to examine relevant policies and strategies to mitigate crowding consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the structures of the relationships between actors in the creative industries sector using crowd-funding, and how co-creation is the basis for reaching balanced centricity in the creative industries.

The Many-to-Many Marketing Theory, Service-Dominant Logic and Service Logic are the theoretical bases for explaining how the changing roles of the actors in the creative industries sector have given the crowd a great capacity for deciding in the value-creation process. A qualitative, case-based approach is used, given the complexity of the phenomenon to be analysed.

The findings of the empirical approach have important theoretical and practical implications. On the theoretical side, it analyses the importance of balanced centricity instead of customer centricity as the basis for system stability. Findings also have implications for service managers, as this can be considered an alternative for certain business projects, especially in the creative industries sector, where a growing demand is identified, not only as a method of financing, but also as a strategy for strengthening the bond with customers.

The study has implications for practitioners and scholars. With respect to managers, the “balanced centricity in cultural crowd-funding” model constitutes a significant contribution, because it replaces the prominent position which until now has been enjoyed by the consumer, with the overall balance of the system, in other words, with aiming to benefit all agents. This translates into a change in how strategies are understood and applied in organisations, as in every decision organisations will have to keep in mind the implications that their decisions and actions have on the rest of the agents, with the objective of managing to exploit their “strategic potential”. Strategic planning actions are identified.

This paper is the first to analyse balanced centricity as the basis for system stability in the creative industries. The new tasks of the customer as a selector and financer of projects increase the roles assigned to the co-creation concept and improve the knowledge of Network Theory for the creative industries.

There is growing interest in innovative online problem-solving models such as crowdsourcing to serve individuals, firms and the society as a whole. Crowdsourcing is the combination of efforts from various sets of individuals who are either volunteering or working part-time for socioeconomic production, basically in the cyber world. This hybrid work model is already in use by businesses and entrepreneurs; some of the platforms include Amazon mechanical Turk, 99designs, Hit RECORD and Design Crowd.

Much has been parleyed and published, and this is primarily because of the efficient socioeconomic potentials crowdsourcing offers.

This paper addressed the following three questions to help have a better understanding of crowdsourcing: who can perform crowdsourcing? why it is relevant to crowdsource in this present proliferated internet age and if there are going to be some changes in the future and the last but not the least what can be done to promote it in the society?

This paper discusses the three W’s and concludes with challenges facing the crowdsourcing work model.

Detecting and tracking the position of a mobile user has become one of the important subjects in many mobile applications. Such applications use location based services (LBS) for learning and training user movements in different places (cities, markets, airports, stations) along different modes of transport (bus, car, cycle, walk). To date, GPS is the key solution to all LBS but repeated GPS querying is not economical in terms of the battery life of the mobile phone. The purpose of this paper is to study how cheap and energy‐efficient air pressure sensors measuring the altitude could be used, as a complement to the dominant GPS system. The location detection and route tracking task is then accomplished by matching the collected altitude traces with the altitude curves of stored data to find the best matching routes.

The cornerstone of the authors' approach is that a huge amount of route data, collected with GPS devices, is available in various cloud services. In order to evaluate the mechanism of matching routes with altitude data, the authors build a prototype system of crowd‐sourced database containing only altitude data of different routes along different modes of transport. How accurately this stored altitude data could be matched with the collected altitude traces is the key question of this study.

Results show that, within a certain level of accuracy, older repeated routes can be detected from newly tracked altitude traces. Further, the level of accuracy varies depending on the length of path traversed, route curvature, speed of travel and sensor used for tracking.

The new contribution in this paper is to propose an alternative route detection mechanism which minimizes the use of GPS query. This concept will help in retrieving the GPS coordinates of already traversed routes stored in a large database by matching them with currently tracked altitude curves.

Startups across all sectors are affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and are facing a formidable challenge in terms of marketing and operations. Most of the startups have experienced a downturn in demand and supply due to COVID-19 led disturbances in sourcing networks. This paper aims to identify, analyze and categorize the significant risks influencing sourcing operations in startups during the COVID-19 era in India, using the total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) approach.

Eight enablers were identified through literature review and expert opinions from various startups in India. This study adopted the TISM approach to analyze the inter-relationships between the enablers. Multiplication Applied to Classification (MICMAC) analysis was used to rank the sourcing risk enablers and classify them as autonomous, independent, linkage and dependent enablers.

The results indicate “insufficient fund” as the most critical enabler. Network issues and employee flexibility risk were among the other critical enablers that have a high driving power. Supplier risk, quality risk and demand risk were found to have highly dependent on other enablers for implementation.

This study mainly focuses on the sourcing risks in startup operations in India. This study can be extended to many other countries.

This study will help startup industry managers and practitioners understand the interactions of enablers and identify critical enablers to mitigate risks in startup sourcing operations in the COVID-19 era.

The present study identifies the sourcing risk enablers in the COVID-19 era. It is the first attempt to analyze the interrelationship among sourcing risks in startups using the TISM approach.