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PublicationRate or Trade? Identifying Winning Ideas in Open Idea SourcingInformation technology (IT) has created new patterns of digitally-mediated collaboration that allow open sourcing of ideas for new products and services. These novel sociotechnical arrangements afford finely-grained manipulation of how tasks can be represented and have changed the way organizations ideate. In this paper, we investigate differences in behavioral decision-making resulting from IT-based support of open idea evaluation. We report results from a randomized experiment of 120 participants comparing IT-based decision-making support using a rating scale (representing a judgment task) and a preference market (representing a choice task). We find that the rating scale-based task invokes significantly higher perceived ease of use than the preference market-based task and that perceived ease of use mediates the effect of the task representation treatment on the users’ decision quality. Furthermore, we find that the understandability of ideas being evaluated, which we assess through the ideas’ readability, and the perception of the task’s variability moderate the strength of this mediation effect, which becomes stronger with increasing perceived task variability and decreasing understandability of the ideas. We contribute to the literature by explaining how perceptual differences of task representations for open idea evaluation affect the decision quality of users and translate into differences in mechanism accuracy. These results enhance our understanding of how crowdsourcing as a novel mode of value creation may effectively complement traditional work structures.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
Scopus© Citations 78 -
PublicationManaging crowdsourced software testing: a case study based insight on the challenges of a crowdsourcing intermediary(Springer Verlag, 2014-04-01)Crowdsourcing has gained much attention in practice over the last years. Numerous companies have drawn on this concept for performing different tasks and value creation activities. Nevertheless, despite its popularity, there is still comparatively little well-founded knowledge on crowdsourcing, particularly with regard to crowdsourcing intermediaries. Crowdsourcing intermediaries play a key role in crowdsourcing initiatives as they assure the connection between the crowdsourcing companies and the crowd. However, the issue of how crowdsourcing intermediaries manage crowdsourcing initiatives and the associated challenges has not been addresses by research yet. We address these issues by conducting a case study with a German start-up crowdsourcing intermediary called testCloud that offers software testing services for companies intending to partly or fully outsource their testing activities to a certain crowd. The case study shows that testCloud faces three main challenges, these are: managing the process, managing the crowd and managing the technology. For each dimension, we outline mechanisms that testCloud applies for facing the challenges associated with crowdsourcing projects.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
Scopus© Citations 96 -
PublicationLeveraging Crowdsourcing: Activation-Supporting Components for IT-Based Ideas Competition(Sharpe, 2009-06-01)Ideas competitions appear to be a promising tool for crowdsourcing and open innovation processes, especially for business-to-business software companies. Active participation of potential lead users is the key to success. Yet a look at existing ideas competitions in the software field leads to the conclusion that many information technology (IT)-based ideas competitions fail to meet requirements upon which active participation is established. The paper describes how activation-enabling functionalities can be systematically designed and implemented in an IT-based ideas competition for enterprise resource planning software. We proceeded to evaluate the outcomes of these design measures and found that participation can be supported using a two-step model. The components of the model support incentives and motives of users. Incentives and motives of the users then support the process of activation and consequently participation throughout the ideas competition. This contributes to the successful implementation and maintenance of the ideas competition, thereby providing support for the development of promising innovative ideas. The paper concludes with a discussion of further activation-supporting components yet to be implemented and points to rich possibilities for future research in these areas.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
Scopus© Citations 624 -
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PublicationLifelong Learning and Collaboration of Smart Technical Systems in Open-Ended Environments – Opportunistic Collaborative Interactive Learning(IEEE Computer Society Press, 2016-07-19)Today, so-called “smart” or “intelligent” systems heavily rely on machine learning techniques to adjust their behavior by means of sample data (e.g., sensor observations). But, it will be more and more complicated or even impossible to provide those data at design-time of that system. As a consequence, these systems have to learn at run-time. Moreover, these systems will have to self-organize their learning processes. They have to decide which information or knowledge source they use at which time, depending on the quality of the information or knowledge they collect, the availability of these sources, the costs of gathering the information or knowledge, etc. With this article, we propose opportunistic collaborative interactive learning (O-CIL) as a new learning principle for future, even “smarter” systems. O-CIL will enable a “lifelong” or “neverending” learning of such systems in open-ended (i.e., time-variant) environments, based on active behavior and collaboration of such systems. Not only these systems collaborate, also humans collaborate either directly or indirectly by interacting with these systems. The article characterizes O-CIL, summarizes related work, sketches research challenges, and illustrates O-CIL with some preliminary results.
Scopus© Citations 11 -
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.
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PublicationUnderstanding the Principles of Crowdsourcing in the Light of The Commons-Based Peer Production Model(Academy of Management, 2013-08-09)
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PublicationTowards Open Innovation In Universities : Fostering the Inside-Out-Process Using Ideas Competitions(European Academy of Management, 2012-06-06)
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PublicationAccelerating customer integration into innovation processes using Pico-Jobs(Internat. Soc. for Professional Innovation Management, 2010-06-08)
