Adaptation Barriers in Internal Crowdsourcing: A Multiple Case Study

Recently, the application of internal crowdsourcing in companies as a new form of orchestrating work has increased substantially. Early research has shown that organizations should apply internal crowdsourcing due to its benefits, such as fast access to internal knowledge and increased productivi-ty. Although studies have identified some advantages, internal crowdsourcing is a complex initiative and we do not sufficiently know how to rollout internal crowdsourcing initiatives in a company and to guide them to a state of stable operations in the adaptation stage. Some papers derived barriers for internal crowdsourcing and solutions on how to overcome them. However, these barriers address mostly the operational stage, when the initiative is already stable. Some papers address adaptation barriers, but the assessment frameworks in current literature used to detect them were incomprehen-sive resulting in only few adaptation barriers and solutions. Therefore, we identify the adaptation bar-riers of internal crowdsourcing comprehensively through the technochange theory in a multiple case study, assess what solutions the companies applied and describe how the solutions work in order to display how to overcome barriers in a consolidated introduction model for internal crowdsourcing.