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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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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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Crowd Work

2016 , Durward, David , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco

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Massive Open Online Courses

2014-04-01 , Wulf, Jochen , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Brenner, Walter

From an information systems research perspective, MOOCs represent an innovative, web-based business model for financing, designing, and provisioning educational services. Due to the increasing digitization and respective structuring of these services, the laws of the Internet economy Shapiro and Varian 1999; marginal costs of additional participants tend towards zero, occurrence of network and long-tail effects) open up higher education and vocational training to the masses. Thus, MOOCs offer great potential (e.g., increased effectiveness and eefficiencyin education) and challenges (e.g., new competitors) for academic institutions and other providers of educational services. The current academic discussion on MOOCs focuses on the different types of MOOCs the involved didactic concepts, as well as the technology and mechanisms that facilitate the scaling of educational services.

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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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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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Anatomy of Successful Business Models for Complex Services: Insights from the Telemedicine Field

2015-12-16 , Peters, Christoph , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco

Telemedicine services may improve the quality of life of individuals while also reducing the costs of service provisioning. They represent an important but as yet understudied type of complex services that integrates many stakeholders acting in service value networks. These complex services typically comprise a combination of information technology (IT) services and highly person-oriented, non-IT services, and are characterized by long service delivery periods. In such an environment, it is particularly difficult to generate successful and sustainable business models, which are necessary for the widespread provision of telemedicine services. Following a design research approach, we develop and evaluate the CompBizMod framework, a morphological box allowing for: (1) the analysis, description, and classification of telemedicine business models, (2) the identification of white spots for future business opportunities, (3) and the identification of patterns for successful business models. We contribute to the literature by presenting a specific business model framework and identifying three business model patterns in the telemedicine industry. We exhibit how business models for complex services can be decomposed into their constituent elements and present an easy and replicable approach for identifying business model patterns in a given industry.

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Internes Crowdsourcing – Herausforderungen und Lösungsstrategien für eine erfolgreiche Transformation der Arbeitsorganisation

2019-07-01 , Knop, Nicolas , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco

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Rate or Trade? Identifying Winning Ideas in Open Idea Sourcing

2016-03 , Blohm, Ivo , Riedl, Christoph , Füller, Johann , Leimeister, Jan Marco

Information 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.

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Massive Open Online Courses

2014-04-01 , Wulf, Jochen , Blohm, Ivo , Leimeister, Jan Marco , Brenner, Walter