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When is crowdsourcing advantageous? - Organizing for succesful crowdsourcing
Type
fundamental research project
Start Date
01 June 2013
End Date
31 October 2014
Status
ongoing
Keywords
Crowdsourcing
web 2.0
labor organization
software industry
resource-based view
transaction cost economics
case study
Description
Today, the Swiss IT and software industry contributes disproportionately high to Swiss welfare creation. In 2010, 4% of employees created 5.2 % of the gross domestic product - as much as mechanical engineering and the pharmaceutical industry taken together. However, Swiss IT companies will face a short supply of qualified personnel in the near future. Considering constant immigration and future new graduates, there will be a lack of 25,000 employees in 2020. As the number of IT graduates has been declining for ten years, this amount of new employees will not be available. Consequently, the IT sector´s productivity and contribution to welfare creation will decline with Swiss IT companies going abroad.
Crowdsourcing may reflect a solution to the upcoming shortage of IT personnel. It empowers organizations to tap into the creativity, knowledge and distributed workforce of millions of people and characterizes a new mode of organizing human labor. However, lacking are theories that explain when crowdsourcing is an effective way of value creation and how organizations can organize and manage crowdsourcing effectively. Based on this research gaps, we aim to research how Swiss IT companies can systematically crowdsource software development projects in order to maintain or even improve their productivity while facing personnel shortage. Doing so, we intend to review software development and IT outsourcing literature in order to derive a theoretical framework that describes how characteristics of software development projects and organizational capabilities jointly affect crowdsourcing success. Conducting multiple case studies, we will then empirically verify how and why project characteristics and organizational capabilities influence crowdsourcing success applying transaction cost economics (TCE) and the resource-based view (RBV). In a consecutive analysis, we then use our understanding of successfully crowdsourced software development projects in order to expand our cases such that we can investigate how crowdsourcing can systematically be organized and managed.
For practice, our project will help Swiss IT companies to unravel which types of software development projects are apt for crowdsourcing and how such projects can be managed effectively. For academia, our theoretical integration of TCE and crowdsourcing research will contribute a more indulgent conceptualization of crowdsourcing success taking into account crowdsourcing's potential to obtain more effective problem solutions as well as arising transaction costs. Further, in conjecture with the RBV, we follow the call of various researchers and contribute theoretical underpinnings to the circumstances and contingencies of successful crowdsourcing. As software development describes an activity of systematically manufacturing software in an industrialized fashion, we also contribute to TCE where neither the nature of production costs nor their interrelation with transaction costs are well understood.
Crowdsourcing may reflect a solution to the upcoming shortage of IT personnel. It empowers organizations to tap into the creativity, knowledge and distributed workforce of millions of people and characterizes a new mode of organizing human labor. However, lacking are theories that explain when crowdsourcing is an effective way of value creation and how organizations can organize and manage crowdsourcing effectively. Based on this research gaps, we aim to research how Swiss IT companies can systematically crowdsource software development projects in order to maintain or even improve their productivity while facing personnel shortage. Doing so, we intend to review software development and IT outsourcing literature in order to derive a theoretical framework that describes how characteristics of software development projects and organizational capabilities jointly affect crowdsourcing success. Conducting multiple case studies, we will then empirically verify how and why project characteristics and organizational capabilities influence crowdsourcing success applying transaction cost economics (TCE) and the resource-based view (RBV). In a consecutive analysis, we then use our understanding of successfully crowdsourced software development projects in order to expand our cases such that we can investigate how crowdsourcing can systematically be organized and managed.
For practice, our project will help Swiss IT companies to unravel which types of software development projects are apt for crowdsourcing and how such projects can be managed effectively. For academia, our theoretical integration of TCE and crowdsourcing research will contribute a more indulgent conceptualization of crowdsourcing success taking into account crowdsourcing's potential to obtain more effective problem solutions as well as arising transaction costs. Further, in conjecture with the RBV, we follow the call of various researchers and contribute theoretical underpinnings to the circumstances and contingencies of successful crowdsourcing. As software development describes an activity of systematically manufacturing software in an industrialized fashion, we also contribute to TCE where neither the nature of production costs nor their interrelation with transaction costs are well understood.
Leader contributor(s)
Funder(s)
Topic(s)
Crowdsourcing
web 2.0
labor organization
software industry
resource-based view
transaction cost economics
case study
Method(s)
case study research
Range
Institute/School
Range (De)
Institut/School
Division(s)
Eprints ID
223401
17 results
Now showing
1 - 10 of 17
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PublicationDienstleistungen von der Crowd: Crowdsourcing und Crowd WorkType: newspaper articleVolume: Portfolio-Management im Service
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PublicationRags to Riches - How signaling behaviour causes a power shift in crowdsourcing marketsCrowdsourcing has emerged as new form of digital work organization. This novel socio-technical ar-rangement changes the organization of work as well as its general nature. In this paper, we focus on the crowdworkers – a perspective that has been largely neglected by crowdsourcing research. We re-port results from crowdworker-interviews on two different platforms. Our research shows that quality signals of crowdworkers increase the bargaining power towards their principals, i.e. the crowdsourcers. As a result, the crowdworkers can reach a turning point of critical bargaining power at which the distribution of power shifts in their favor. We contribute to the literature by unraveling signaling behavior as mechanism influencing bargaining power and thus success in crowdsourcing. Beyond, we develop a theoretical model that indicates a shift in bargaining power over time and im-proves our understanding of crowdsourcing as novel way of organizing digital work. For practice, our results provide guidelines for crowdworkers how to improve their position in bargaining in relation to the crowdsourcer.Type: conference paper
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Publication
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PublicationWhen is Crowdsourcing Advantageous? The Case of Crowdsourced Software Testing(Boğaziçi University, 2016)
;Knop, Nicolas ;Müller-Bloch, ChristophCrowdsourcing describes a novel mode of value creation in which organizations broadcast tasks that have been previously performed in-house to a large magnitude of Internet users that perform these tasks. Although the concept has gained maturity and has proven to be an alternative way of problem-solving, an organizational cost-benefit perspective has largely been neglected by existing research. More specifically, it remains unclear when crowdsourcing is advantageous in comparison to alternative governance structures such as in-house production. Drawing on crowdsourcing literature and transaction action cost theory, we present two case studies from the domain of crowdsourced software testing. We systematically analyze two organizations that applied crowdtesting to test a mobile application. As both organizations tested the application via crowdtesting and their traditional in-house testing, we are able to relate the effectiveness of crowdtesting and the associated costs to the effectiveness and costs of in-house testing. We find that crowdtesting is comparable in terms of testing quality and costs, but provides large advantages in terms of speed, heterogeneity of testers and user feedback as added value. We contribute to the crowdsourcing literature by providing first empirical evidence about the instances in which crowdsourcing is an advantageous way of problem solving.Type: conference paper -
PublicationArbeit und IT: Crowdsourcing und Crowdwork als neue Arbeits- und BeschäftigungsformenType: book sectionVolume: 1. Aufl.
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PublicationThe Rise of Crowd Aggregators - How Individual Workers Restructure Their Own Crowd( 2017-02-12)
;Durward, DavidCrowd work has emerged as a new form of digital gainful employment whose nature is still a black box. In this paper, we focus on the crowd workers – a perspective that has been largely neglected by research. We report results from crowd worker interviews on two different platforms. Our findings illustrate that crowd aggregators as new players restructure the nature of crowd work sustainably with different effects on the behavior as well as the existing relationships of crowd workers. We contribute to prior research by developing a theoretical framework based on value chain and work aggregation theories which are applicable in this new form of digital labor. For practice, our results provide initial insights that need to be taken into account as part of the ongoing discussion on fair and decent conditions in crowd work.Type: conference paper -
PublicationHow to Systematically Conduct Crowdsourced Software Testing? Insights from an Action Research ProjectNowadays, traditional testing approaches become less feasible – both economically and practicably - for several reasons, such as an increasingly dynamic environment, shorter product lifecycles, cost pressure, as well as a fast growing and increasingly segmented hardware market. With the surge towards new modes of value creation, crowdsourced software testing (CST) seems to be a promising solution to effectively solve these problems and was already applied in various software testing contexts. However, literature so far mostly neglected the perspective of an organization intending to crowdsource tasks. In this study, we present an ongoing action research project with a consortium of six companies and present a preliminary model for crowdsourced software testing in organizations. The model unfolds necessary activities, process changes, and the accompanied roles for crowdsourced software testing to enable organizations to systematically conduct such initiatives and illustrates how test departments can use crowdsourcing as a new tool in their department.Type: conference paper
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PublicationTowards Successful Crowdsourcing Projects: Evaluating the Implementation of Governance Mechanisms(Association for Information Systems, 2015-12-13)
;Zogaj, ShkodranBretschneider, UlrichThe last decade has witnessed the proliferation of crowdsourcing in various academic domains including strategic management, computer science, or IS research. Numerous companies have drawn on this concept and leveraged the wisdom of crowds for various purposes. However, not all crowdsourcing projects turn out to be a striking success. Hence, research and practice are on the lookout for the main factors influencing the success of crowdsourcing projects. In this context, proper governance is considered as the key to success by several researchers. However, little is known about governance mechanisms and their impact on project outcomes. We address this issue by means of a multiple case analysis in the scope of which we examine crowdsourcing projects on collaboration-based and/or competition-based crowdsourcing systems. Our initial study reveals that task definition mechanisms and quality assurance mechanisms have the highest impact on the success of crowdsourcing projects, whereas task allocation mechanisms are less decisive.Type: conference paper -
PublicationCrowdsourcing und Crowd Work - Neue Formen digitaler Arbeit(Verlag aw&I Wissenschaft und Praxis, 2015)
;Zogaj, Shkodran ;Durward, DavidBullinger, Angelika C.Type: book section