Governing Crowds Solving Ill-structured Innovation Problems

Current theories of crowdsourced search, in which individual crowd participants autonomously offer solutions for solving a broadcasted problem, suggest that firms constrain their search to well-structured problems, leaving ill-structured problems not being crowdsourced. We theorize that both ill- and well-structured problems can be crowdsourced, but with different theoretically derived governance approaches. We hypothesize that crowds asked to solve ill-structured problems offer innovative solutions when governed to better frame the problem by offering their problem frames and integrating others as they solve it.  We conduct a field study of over a thousand participants in 20 different crowdsourcing events with interventions for different governance approaches applied to the different events. We find evidence for our hypothesis and offer implications for future research.

Zoom link: https://eur-nl.zoom.us/j/99233764553?pwd=VFkxZU1vcnNHcER3OVpLS0lTajZWZz09&from=addon

Meeting ID: 992 3376 4553