When is crowdsourcing advantageous? - Organizing for succesful crowdsourcing

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.