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The purpose of this paper is to examine the manner in which advocates of crowdsourcing reconfigure the classical sociological treatment of the crowd.

The approach taken conceives of the semantics of crowd theorizing in three phases, each of which makes sense of the power dynamics between the elite and the crowd. In phases one and two, the crowd is conceptualized as a problem generator; in phase three, the crowd is depicted as a problem solver and innovator.

This paper provides a critical look at phase three crowd theorizing. It explores how, by ignoring the disruptive power dynamic, crowdsourcing generates a credible image of the crowd as an innovator and problem solver. The work concludes with a discussion of the implications of phase three crowd theorizing for researchers in sociology.

Advocates of the wisdom of crowds, if interested in the sociological implications of their position, must attend to both the disruptive and costly implications of third phase crowd theorizing.

This paper maps the crowdsourcing process and places it in context. It argues that the distance between the classical social scientific treatment of the crowd is not nearly as great as crowdsourcing advocates would have one believe. Nevertheless, phase three crowd theorizing opens up sociologically relevant questions regarding the future portrayal of collective intelligence as a form of virtual property.

Collective intelligence has drawn many scientists’ attention in many centuries. This paper shows the collective intelligence study process in a perspective of crowd science.

After summarizing the time-order process of related researches, different points of views on collective intelligence’s measurement and their modeling methods were outlined.

The authors show the recent research focusing on collective intelligence optimization. The studies on application of collective intelligence and its future potential are also discussed.

This paper will help researchers in crowd science have a better picture of this highly related frontier interdiscipline.

Children are becoming heavy users of communication and information technologies from an early age. These technologies carry risks to which children may be exposed. In collaboration with the Israel Ministry of Education (IME), the authors launched a week-long safe online awareness program for school children in 257 elementary and middle schools in Israel. Each class independently composed a safe and ethical code of online behavior following two classroom debate sessions. The purpose of this study was to analyze these codes and learn how school children perceive and understand the proper use of the network using thematic analysis.

A total of 8,181 students between the ages of 8 and 14 years in 303 classes from 257 schools participated in the program. These classes composed 303 ethical codes, which were decomposed into 2,201 elements (phrases, sentences, or paragraphs). Using mixed-methods research combining quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the elements of the ethical codes were analyzed, interpreted, and classified to identify the dominant themes and discourses used by the students when addressing issues related to safe online use.

Findings indicate that Israeli students are aware of the dangers and risks of the internet, and these concerns are reflected in their own ethical codes. The students discouraged online self-exposure and encouraged precautions and wariness towards members of out-groups. The themes included sentences which asked for responsible, appropriate, and lawful use, expressed concern about privacy issues, and stated the need for adult involvement. Most of them reflected an “us against them (strangers)” perspective.

The current study presents an innovative “bottom-up” program based on wisdom of the crowd approach, that can be implemented in schools internationally in order to encourage reflexivity and teach children the necessary skills for safe online experiences. In addition, this study analyses the school children’s own views of the dangers of social media and learn about their perspective and understanding of internet use.

The purpose of this study is to offer implications and future research directions related to new organizational forms like crowds. Organizations are increasingly relying on online crowds to innovate through mechanisms such as crowdsourcing, open innovation, innovation challenges and tournaments. To leverage the "wisdom of crowds", crowdsourcing platforms that enable heterogeneous knowledge sharing in crowds lead to novel solution generation by individuals in the crowd. Based on the associative variety memory model of creativity, the authors hypothesize that when a crowd contributes a heterogeneous knowledge in form of a variety of knowledge associations, individual crowd members tend to generate solutions that are more novel. In contrast to the brainstorming view that focuses on ideas as knowledge, the authors propose, test, find and elaborate on implications of crowd sharing of heterogeneous knowledge for the generation of innovation, i.e. novel ideas. The authors coded and analyzed all the posts in 20 innovation challenges leveraging online temporary crowds that were structured to foster knowledge sharing as part of the idea generation process. The analysis shows a positive relationship between the variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd and the generation of novel solutions by individuals in the crowd. Further, the variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd has a stronger relationship with novel solution generation than the number of associations generated by the crowd, i.e. variety of knowledge has a greater impact than either the quantity of knowledge or the number of solution-ideas shared. The authors offer four implications and several future directions for research on the new organizational form of online crowds.

The authors coded and analyzed all the posts in 20 innovation challenges. They also designed and ran these challenges in collaboration with corporate sponsors. The ideas in the challenge were rated by senior executive at each company using a creative forecasting method.

The variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd has a stronger relationship with novel solution generation than the number of associations generated by the crowd, i.e. variety of knowledge has a greater impact than either the quantity of knowledge or the number of solution-ideas shared.

The authors offer four implications and several future directions for research on the new organizational form of online crowds.

The authors propose several ways in which companies running innovation challenges can moderate and encourage crowd to generate a variety of knowledge.

The authors believe that we are the first empirical paper to emphasize and show that associative variety of knowledge sharing in crowds has impact on novel idea generation by crowds. This view is counter to "electronic brainstorming" view where crowd is asked to just generate these ideas and often just submit their ideas to the sponsor. Their view also goes beyond knowledge refinement of ideas by crowds to more of knowledge integration by crowds.

The purpose of this paper was to decipher the contradictions and the ambiguities of crowdfunding as a term and as a practice to reveal the deeper significance of its underlying Zeitgeist.

Three steps were followed. In the first one, the authors underline the ambiguities of crowd as a concept in its traditional meaning as well as in the realities, it may depict when referring to connected people. Thereafter, the many practices of crowdfunding with the apparent univocity of this term were confronted.

These analyses led the authors to consider crowdfunding as ideology: an incantatory use of crowd can conceal an effective profit-making process, as well as a new way to unblock a stalling social elevator.

As per the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first one to try to conceptualize the social roots of crowdfunding and to analyze its deeper significance, as complementary to an already developed “how-to-do-it” literature. It is worth confronting this piece of reflexivity with the emerging literature on the assessment of specific crowdfunding operations.

The purpose of this paper is to make a contribution to co‐creation theory by integrating conceptual insights from the management and marketing literatures that are both concerned with co‐creation phenomena. It aims to develop a reference model for comparing how different organizations organize and manage their co‐creation ventures. It also aims to apply the authors' framework to four distinct cases that illustrate the differences in co‐creation practice within different co‐creation environments.

The authors compare four different companies based on case profiles. Each company is employing its own distinct approach to co‐creating. The authors employ a method mix including literature analysis, structured interviews, document and web site analysis, as well as participation.

The reference model offers a set of useful dimensions for case‐based inquiry. The case comparisons show how firms may decide to systematise and manage a mix of co‐creation activities within B2B versus B2C contexts, utilising either crowd‐sourced or non‐crowd‐sourced approaches. Further, the case comparisons suggest that there are less differences in B2B versus B2C co‐creation as compared with crowd‐sourced versus non‐crowd‐sourced approaches. Ultimately, implementation decisions in one dimension of co‐creation design (e.g. whom to involve in co‐creation) will affect other dimensions of implementation and governance (e.g. how much intimacy) and thus how co‐creation needs to be managed.

The paper presents case comparisons utilising B2B versus B2C, as well as crowd versus non‐crowd‐sourcing examples of co‐creation and an original decision support framework for assessing and comparing co‐creation choices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the different heuristics adopted by a crowd and a management committee to evaluate new product proposals, and whether, in assessing the value of proposals, they emphasize different features.

The study takes a quantitative analysis approach to study an internal innovation contest held by the biotechnology company Novozymes. The contest generated 201 proposals that were evaluated by 109 research and development professionals by means of a virtual preference market, and by a management committee.

The crowd and the committees’ assessments of the value of the proposals were based on different features. The committee emphasized experience and inventors’ seniority; the crowd set more store on informative idea descriptions but penalized overly complex and lengthy proposals.

The design of the innovation contest does not allow full comparison of the preference functions of crowd and committee. The findings from this case study cannot be generalized. The early stage of new product development seems fruitful for investigating crowdsourcing and knowledge management.

Firms should consider adopting preference markets for idea screening and evaluation since they appraise ideas from different angles compared to managers. However, they complement, rather than substitute managerial evaluation, especially in the case of more detailed proposals.

This is one of the first attempts to identify differences in the decision-making processes of crowds and committees. The paper identifies their strengths as evaluators of new product ideas and finds that the “wisdom of crowds” has some limitations in relation to the ability to process complex information.

This study’s aim is to investigate the role of investor communication in equity-based crowdfunding. The study explores whether and how investor communication can reduce information asymmetries between investors and new ventures in equity-based crowdfunding, thereby facilitating the crowd’s investment decisions.

This paper follows an exploratory qualitative research approach based on semi-structured interviews with 23 market participants in equity-based crowdfunding: 12 investors, 6 new ventures and 5 third parties (mostly platform operators). After analyzing, coding and categorizing the data, this paper developed a theoretical framework and presented it in a set of six propositions.

The results indicate that the venture’s overall impression – especially perceived sympathy, openness and trustworthiness – is important to reduce perceived information asymmetries of investors in equity-based crowdfunding. To communicate these soft facts, personal communication seems to be replaced by pseudo-personal communication over the Internet (e.g. videos, investor relations channels and social media). In addition, the communications of third parties (e.g. other crowd investors, professional and experienced investors and other external stakeholders) influence the decision-making process of investors in equity-based crowdfunding. Third-party endorsements reduce the perceived information asymmetries and lower the importance of pseudo-personal communications by the venture.

Prior research shows that investor communication reduces information asymmetries between companies and investors. Currently, little is known about the role of investor communication in equity-based crowdfunding. This study focuses on the role of investor communication to reduce the perceived information asymmetries of investors in equity-based crowdfunding.

Under certain conditions, a mass of people can be smarter than the best expert – even if the expert is part of the group. In this paper we show how leaders can improve decision making by tapping into the collective intelligence of their organization.

Based on James Surowiecki’s four conditions of collective intelligence (cognitive diversity, independence, utilization of decentralized knowledge, and effective aggregation of dispersed knowledge), we discuss how leaders can tap into the wisdom of the crowd of their organizations.

We show how leaders can increase cognitive diversity in decision making, access decentralized knowledge in their organizations, encourage individuals to contribute their knowledge without interference from peer pressure, conformity or influence from superiors, and how knowledge can effectively be aggregated to make wiser decisions.

While various tools exist to reap the collective intelligence of a group, we argue that leaders also must change their attitudes and leadership styles. Using evidence from various studies and several examples we show what leaders can do to make smarter decisions.

In any business process a firm begins with a concept or model of how it hopes to accomplish its goals to provide value to customers and participate in market successfully. This model forms the basis of how the business is structured and organized, how it operates in the marketplace and its scope and limitations. In this article, we present the proposition that innovation, typically an unstructured initiative or task, requires its own model, and has a number of defined attributes. A successful innovation capability is based on defining these attributes and aligning them to the strategic goals of the organization and the intent or purpose of the innovation effort.