Bee Up: Crowdsourcing als Ansatz zur Geschäftsmodellentwicklung von KMU

Enabled by Internet-based technologies, users are increasingly participating and collaborating in idea generation in online innovation communities. However, with the limited understanding of the phenomenon, few studies have investigated what determines the quality of ideas. This study aims at addressing the knowledge gap. We find that idea experimentation effort, i.e., the effort associated with creating the idea, and idea review, i.e., comments by other users, influence idea quality. Further, idea recombination, i.e. peer users participating in wiki-based edits, have a positive influence on idea Quality, in case idea experimentation effort was low, and a negative influence in case of high idea experimentation effort. These results contribute to idea generation, knowledge collaboration, and user generated content literature by investigating the mechanisms through which collaboration influences the quality of the collaborative outcome (i.e., idea quality) in online contexts for the first time. Advice for organizations running online innovation communities is provided.

In the past few years, Sharing Economy (SE) has become increasingly popular mainly for consumer research. Past research focused on describing the phenomenon itself and its disrupting influences on current economic mechanisms. However, information systems (IS) research and scientific literature in general still lack a common understanding of SE and its underlying mechanisms. We therefore elaborate on this gap by conducting a literature review among contributions within IS scholarship that address SE in order to identify to what extent past IS research has covered the topic yet. We aimed to highlight interrelations to adjacent topics and illustrate potential research gaps. As a result, we identified the four perspectives on how the topic is addressed, namely business model, sharing service, sharing asset and exogenous influences. Furthermore, we identified the four principles of SE, which are multi-sided markets, crowdsourcing, trust and recommendation and consumption-based pricing. With this contribution, we aim to guide further investigation of the topic. Additionally, we aim to highlight potential research gaps, as we claim SE to become much more relevant for IS in near future.

Organizations usually strive for innovation to achieve economic growth. Thereby, incremental innovation of e.g., existing products is often the most attractive way because it is plannable to a certain extent and often reveals short-term success. However, many markets change due to new competitive structures caused by the rise of digital services, which facilitates market entries of new companies. For an incumbent firm trying to cope with these competitors, exploitation of existing ideas and technologies (i.e., incremental innovation) is not enough. Although these firms usually pay minor attention to it, they need to additionally explore how to establish disruptive innovation that complements or even changes their traditional business model before competitors do. In this contribution, we present a novel structure to foster exploratory innovation within incumbent organizations by unleashing the innovative potential of intrapreneurs as peripheral innovators: the Intrapreneur Accelerator. We consider this novel structure a service system for supporting intrapreneurs to develop and implement extraordinary ideas and thus fostering exploratory innovation for the organization. Using a design science approach, we will further present our methodology and our preliminary results, since we have already conducted two of four design iterations.

Virtual idea communities (VIC) are a relatively new phenomenon in business. These communities, in which distributed groups of individual customers focus on voluntarily sharing and elaborating innovation ideas, are used by firms to integrate customers into the ideation for new product development rooted in Chesbrough’s (2003) open innovation paradigm. Developers and decision makers realized especially within the last decade that games or game-like appeals could serve as appropriate gamifications to attract people to participate in VICs. Therefore, gamification gained momentum and has been widely implemented into VICs. The use of gamification does, however, not lead to this intended positive outcome per se. Because of that, obstacles and challenges in the use of gamification have to be considered, which has often been neglected in practice. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to address this topic and to describe major obstacles and challenges in the use of gamification in VICs.