Crowdsourcing expertise to enhance partners’ collaboration in world class innovations.

Abstract

The objective of this thesis was to apply theory related with crowdsourcing in order to find expertise with the purpose of enhancing partners’ collaboration in world-class innovations. The target was to identify ways of managing knowledge intensive activities with a boundariless-IT scope in order to get value from masses. Also to explore how the knowledge of the general market could be used to increase profitability and chances of adoption of new technologies. The objective of the thesis was approached down up from theoretical-background, empirical enquiries with people related to a NGO-activities, and two web-based mechanisms for knowledge management. The literature review helped to identify how crowdsourcing is being used currently, what the development processes of crowsourcing mechanisms are, as well as the challenges and success factors related with crowdsourcing. Qualitative interviews with stakeholders related with two projects of the targeted NGO were carried out in order to understand how crowdsourcing could bolster innovation and enhance partners’ collaboration regardless having country-borders between participants, and all in all the implications of this rather un-explored fact. After the interviews, a wiki and a web-based community were developed at the structural-level with the help of external IT-support in order to gather participation in a crowdsourced-fashion.

After literature review, qualitative inquiries and experiments related with this study, some results can be shared. Regarding the literature review it is possible to say that in order to crowdsource, the need has to be well understood first and well transmitted after. Some needs intended to be crowdsourced might require a lower level of expertise as matters of general interest, while some may require just a simple mouse-click, other needs may require more active participation, and some others a blend of both. In the case of needs that require high-level of expertise a well established community is a must in order to support the crowd-interactions. Also from literature review it is possible to say that some of the success factors that have been identified are relevant when trying to get results in practice, especially when it comes of having a clear goal and keeping things as simple as possible. From the qualitative-interviews it was possible to see conflicting approaches about information management. It seems that certain issues related with matters of particular-interests still want to be kept near the chest and reluctance to share information online seems to be present; but at the same time it is accepted that more openness is needed in development-processes in order to create more value. Also the wide availability of managerial tools to handle innovation-processes online, that are not available for the masses, increases the complexity to include crowd contributions and unify a single-notion. When it comes to the design, deployment, and the use of online-tools the literature provides limited guidance to the extent of supporting discretional managerial approaches with rules of thumbs for development paths and decision making. When it comes to the implementation phase, many ideas to be developed are difficult to get through, even to communicate and as a result, the implementation-phase might get tough before adoption.

The rationale behind crowds do not follow a path of charity, if it is intended to receive support from online-crowds it is necessary to either have an interesting project or an interesting reward; if possible better both. A well motivated steering-community closely related with the outcome of the project is a must in order to conduct the crowd. The success of crowd-ventures is also strongly related with persistence, professionalism, monitoring of key performance indicators, split of data and metadata, team built up capacity, resources-availability and the ability to present information coherently. As a result this study presents further details about some of the success factors, risks and limitations to be considered for institutions aiming to manage open-audience contributions.