Now showing 1 - 10 of 113
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How to Manage Crowdsourcing Platforms Effectively

2020 , Blohm, Ivo , Zogaj, Shkodran , Bretschneider, Ulrich , Leimeister, Jan Marco

Crowdsourced tasks are very diverse – and so are platform types. They fall into four categories, each demanding different governance mechanisms. The main goal of microtasking crowdsourcing platforms is the scalable and time-efficient batch processing of highly repetitive tasks. Crowdsourcing platforms for information pooling aggregate contributions such as votes, opinions, assessments and forecasts through approaches such as averaging, summation, or visualization. Broadcast search platforms collect contributions to solve tasks in order to gain alternative insights and solutions from people outside the organization, and are particularly suited for solving challenging technical, analytical, scientific, or creative problems. Open collaboration platforms invite contributors to team up to jointly solve complex problems in cases where solutions require the integration of distributed knowledge and the skills of many contributors. Companies establishing crowdsourcing platforms of any type should continuously monitor and adjust their governance mechanisms. Quality and quantity of contributions, project runtime, or the effort for conducting the crowdsourcing project may be good starting points.

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How to Manage Crowdsourcing Platforms Effectively?

2018-02-01 , Blohm, Ivo , Zogaj, Shkodran , Bretschneider, Ulrich , Leimeister, Jan Marco

To profit from crowdsourcing, organizations can engage in four different approaches: microtasking, information pooling, broadcast search, and open collaboration. This article presents 21 governance mechanisms that can help organizations manage their crowdsourcing platforms. It investigates the effectiveness of these governance mechanisms in 19 case studies and recommends specific configurations of these mechanisms for each of the four crowdsourcing approaches. Also, it offers guidance to organizations that host a crowdsourcing platform by providing recommendations for implementing governance mechanisms into their platforms and building up governance capabilities for crowdsourcing.

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Managing crowdsourced software testing: a case study based insight on the challenges of a crowdsourcing intermediary

2014-04-01 , Zogaj, Shkodran , Bretschneider, Ulrich , Leimeister, Jan Marco

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.

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Crowdsourcing : Crowdfunding, Crowdvoting, Crowdcreation

2012-12-01 , Leimeister, Jan Marco

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The Nature of Crowd Work and its Effects on Individuals’ Work Perception

2020-03-03 , Durward, David , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco

Crowd work reflects a new form of gainful employment on the Internet. We study how the nature of the tasks being performed and financial compensation jointly shape work perceptions of crowdworkers in order to better understand the changing modes and patterns of digital work. Surveying individuals on 23 German crowd working platforms, this work is the first to add a multi-platform perspective on perceived working conditions in crowd work. We show that crowd workers need rather high levels of financial compensation before task characteristics become relevant for shaping favorable perceptions of working conditions. We explain these results by considering financial compensation as an informational cue indicating the appreciation of working effort that is internalized by well-paid crowd workers. Resulting boundary conditions for task design are discussed. These results help us understand when and under what conditions crowd work can be regarded as a fulfilling type of employment in highly developed countries.

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IT-enabled Product Innovation: Customer Motivation for Participating in Virtual Idea Communities

2015 , Bretschneider, Ulrich , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Mathiassen, Lars

Virtual idea communities (VICs) such as Dell's 'Ideastorm' are very popular in practice. In VICs, customers of firms can submit ideas to support product innovation. This customer-based ideation is not new. Customers have been brought together in lead-user-workshops or focus-groups since the 1980s to support product innovation. However, VICs represents a new form of IT-mediated ideation with customers. While extant research has provided insights into customers' motives for participating in traditional ideation, we know little about the motivations that drive customer participation in this new form of IT-enabled ideation. Based on a survey of customer motivations for participation, we found evidence for motives that arise directly due to the VIC's IT-ability to support visualisation of customer ideas, to give feedback on ideas, and to support customers' social interactions. As a result, VICs are perceived as a way to demonstrate personal capabilities, for getting recognition, and for facilitating social interaction.

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Crowdsourcing: How to Benefit from (Too) Many Great Ideas

2013-12 , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Krcmar, Helmut

This article focuses on how companies can cope with the enormous volume and variety of data (big data) that is acquired on crowdsourcing platforms from the worldwide community of Internet users. We identify the challenges of implementing crowdsourcing platforms and show how CIOs and other organizational leaders can build the absorptive capacity necessary to extract business value from crowdsourced data.

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Why Incorporating a Platform-Intermediary can Increase Crowdsourcees’ Engagement

2019 , Troll, Julia , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco

While the crowdsourcer’s job is to encourage valuable contributions and sustained commitment in a cost-effective manner, it seems as if the primary attention of management and research is still centered on the evaluation of contributions rather than the crowd. As many crowdsourcers lack the resources to successfully execute such projects, crowdsourcing intermediaries play an increasingly important role. First studies dealt with internal management challenges of incorporating an intermediary. However, the issue of how intermediaries influence crowdsourcees’ psychological and behavioral responses, further referred to as engagement, has not been addressed yet. Consequently, two leading research questions guide this paper: (1) How can the engagement process of crowdsourcees be conceptualized? (2) How and why do crowdsourcing intermediaries impact crowdsourcees’ engagement? This study extends existing knowledge by offering IS-researchers a process perspective on engagement and exploring the underlying mechanisms and IT-enabled stimuli that foster value-creation in a mediated and non-mediated setting. A theoretical process model is first conceptualized and then explored with insights from two common cases in the growing field of crowd testing. By triangulating platform and interview data, initial propositions concerning the role of specific stimuli and the intermediary within the engagement process are derived. It is proposed that crowdsourcing enterprises, incorporating intermediaries, have the potential to generate a desired engagement state when perceived stimuli under their control belong to the so-called group of “game changers” and “value adders”, while the intermediary controls mainly “risk factors” for absorbing negative experiences. Apart from the theoretical relevance of studying mediated engagement processes and explaining voluntary use and participation in a socio-technical system, findings support decisions on how to effectively incorporate platform intermediaries.

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Digital services for consumers

2014-12-01 , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Österle, Hubert , Alter, Steven

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Scenario planning for innovation development: an overview of different innovation domains

2012-01 , Fähling, J. , Huber, M. , Böhm, F. , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Krcmar, Helmut

Innovations expressed by customers are often unstructured, unclear, and ambiguous, making it difficult to interpret customers' contributions, integrate them into a company's R&D department and transfer them into comprehensible requirements for the development of product, service or software innovations. To close this gap, the paper presents scenarios as a technique to support communication between customers and developers along the R&D process and to reduce feedback cycles. A basic understanding of scenarios and their application in innovation management is delivered by outlining scenario definitions, identifying dimensions for the classification of scenarios, and providing an overview of scenario representation techniques for different innovation domains.