Now showing 1 - 10 of 48
  • Publication
    How to Manage Crowdsourcing Platforms Effectively
    (Sciendo, 2020) ;
    Zogaj, Shkodran
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    Bretschneider, Ulrich
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    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.
  • Publication
    The Nature of Crowd Work and its Effects on Individuals’ Work Perception
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020-03-03)
    Durward, David
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    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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    Scopus© Citations 47
  • Publication
    Modeling Support for Mass Collaboration in Open Innovation Initiatives-The Facilitation Process Model 2.0
    (IEEE, 2020) ;
    Briggs, Robert Owen
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    de Vreede, Gert-Jan
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    Oeste-Reiss, Sarah
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    Many governments and organizations recognize the potential of open innovation (OI) models to create value with large numbers of people beyond the organization. It can be challenging , however, to design an effective collaborative process for a massive group. Collaboration engineering (CE) is an approach for the design and deployment of repeatable collaborative work practices that can be executed by practitioners themselves without the ongoing support of external collaboration engineers. To manage the complexity of the design process, they use a modeling technique called facilitation process models (FPM) to capture high-level design decisions that serve different purposes, such as documenting and communicating a design, etc. FPM, however, was developed to support designs for groups of fewer than 100 people. It does not yet represent design elements that become important when designing for groups of hundreds or thousands of participants, which can be found in many OI settings. We use a design science approach to identify the limitations of the original FPM and derive requirements for extending FPM. This article contributes to the CE and to the OI literature by offering an FPM 2.0 that assists CE designers to design new OI processes, with a special focus on outside-in OI.
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    Scopus© Citations 5
  • Publication
    Why Incorporating a Platform-Intermediary can Increase Crowdsourcees’ Engagement
    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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  • Publication
    How to Manage Crowdsourcing Platforms Effectively?
    (Sage Publishing, 2018-02-01) ;
    Zogaj, Shkodran
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    Bretschneider, Ulrich
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    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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    Scopus© Citations 84
  • Publication
    Leveraging the Power of the Crowd for Software Testing
    (IEEE Computer Society, 2017-03-28) ; ;
    The rapid development of new IT-enabled business models, a fast-growing hardware market, and that market's segmentation are making software testing more complex. So, manual testing is becoming less applicable--economically and practicably. One approach to overcome these issues is crowdtesting--using crowdsourcing to perform testing. To profit from crowdtesting, companies can use three approaches: engage an external crowd of Internet users, engage their employees, or engage their customers. Three case studies illustrate these approaches' differences, benefits, and challenges, and the potential solutions to those challenges. Researchers' experiences with these approaches have led to guidelines that can help software development executives establish crowdtesting in their organizations.
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    Scopus© Citations 36
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  • Publication
    Crowd Work
    (Springer Gabler, 2016)
    Durward, David
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    Scopus© Citations 72
  • Publication
    Can the Crowd Do the Job? Exploring the Effects of Integrating Customers into a Company's Business Model Innovation
    (Imperial College Press, 2016) ;
    Bretschneider, Ulrich
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    While collaborative business modeling (CBM) constitutes a promising new approach for opening up a company’s innovation process, existing literature lacks empirical evidence of the effects related to this approach. Drawing on related literature on the quality of creative output, this paper proposes that in the context of a CBM initiative, the integration of customers will improve the quality of the generated output. As indicated by the results of our empirical evaluation, customers are indeed capable of developing high quality business models and are able to outperform company experts when it comes to the task of developing new business models.
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    Scopus© Citations 11
  • Publication
    IT-enabled Product Innovation: Customer Motivation for Participating in Virtual Idea Communities
    (Inderscience Enterprises, 2015)
    Bretschneider, Ulrich
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    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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    Scopus© Citations 26