When is crowdsourcing advantageous? - Organizing for succesful crowdsourcing
Type
fundamental research project
Start Date
June 1, 2013
End Date
October 31, 2014
Status
ongoing
Keywords
Crowdsourcing
web 2.0
labor organization
software industry
resource-based view
transaction cost economics
case study
Description
Today, the Swiss IT and software industry contributes disproportionately high to Swiss welfare creation. In 2010, 4% of employees created 5.2 % of the gross domestic product - as much as mechanical engineering and the pharmaceutical industry taken together. However, Swiss IT companies will face a short supply of qualified personnel in the near future. Considering constant immigration and future new graduates, there will be a lack of 25,000 employees in 2020. As the number of IT graduates has been declining for ten years, this amount of new employees will not be available. Consequently, the IT sector´s productivity and contribution to welfare creation will decline with Swiss IT companies going abroad.
Crowdsourcing may reflect a solution to the upcoming shortage of IT personnel. It empowers organizations to tap into the creativity, knowledge and distributed workforce of millions of people and characterizes a new mode of organizing human labor. However, lacking are theories that explain when crowdsourcing is an effective way of value creation and how organizations can organize and manage crowdsourcing effectively. Based on this research gaps, we aim to research how Swiss IT companies can systematically crowdsource software development projects in order to maintain or even improve their productivity while facing personnel shortage. Doing so, we intend to review software development and IT outsourcing literature in order to derive a theoretical framework that describes how characteristics of software development projects and organizational capabilities jointly affect crowdsourcing success. Conducting multiple case studies, we will then empirically verify how and why project characteristics and organizational capabilities influence crowdsourcing success applying transaction cost economics (TCE) and the resource-based view (RBV). In a consecutive analysis, we then use our understanding of successfully crowdsourced software development projects in order to expand our cases such that we can investigate how crowdsourcing can systematically be organized and managed.
For practice, our project will help Swiss IT companies to unravel which types of software development projects are apt for crowdsourcing and how such projects can be managed effectively. For academia, our theoretical integration of TCE and crowdsourcing research will contribute a more indulgent conceptualization of crowdsourcing success taking into account crowdsourcing's potential to obtain more effective problem solutions as well as arising transaction costs. Further, in conjecture with the RBV, we follow the call of various researchers and contribute theoretical underpinnings to the circumstances and contingencies of successful crowdsourcing. As software development describes an activity of systematically manufacturing software in an industrialized fashion, we also contribute to TCE where neither the nature of production costs nor their interrelation with transaction costs are well understood.
Crowdsourcing may reflect a solution to the upcoming shortage of IT personnel. It empowers organizations to tap into the creativity, knowledge and distributed workforce of millions of people and characterizes a new mode of organizing human labor. However, lacking are theories that explain when crowdsourcing is an effective way of value creation and how organizations can organize and manage crowdsourcing effectively. Based on this research gaps, we aim to research how Swiss IT companies can systematically crowdsource software development projects in order to maintain or even improve their productivity while facing personnel shortage. Doing so, we intend to review software development and IT outsourcing literature in order to derive a theoretical framework that describes how characteristics of software development projects and organizational capabilities jointly affect crowdsourcing success. Conducting multiple case studies, we will then empirically verify how and why project characteristics and organizational capabilities influence crowdsourcing success applying transaction cost economics (TCE) and the resource-based view (RBV). In a consecutive analysis, we then use our understanding of successfully crowdsourced software development projects in order to expand our cases such that we can investigate how crowdsourcing can systematically be organized and managed.
For practice, our project will help Swiss IT companies to unravel which types of software development projects are apt for crowdsourcing and how such projects can be managed effectively. For academia, our theoretical integration of TCE and crowdsourcing research will contribute a more indulgent conceptualization of crowdsourcing success taking into account crowdsourcing's potential to obtain more effective problem solutions as well as arising transaction costs. Further, in conjecture with the RBV, we follow the call of various researchers and contribute theoretical underpinnings to the circumstances and contingencies of successful crowdsourcing. As software development describes an activity of systematically manufacturing software in an industrialized fashion, we also contribute to TCE where neither the nature of production costs nor their interrelation with transaction costs are well understood.
Leader contributor(s)
Funder
Topic(s)
Crowdsourcing
web 2.0
labor organization
software industry
resource-based view
transaction cost economics
case study
Method(s)
case study research
Range
Institute/School
Range (De)
Institut/School
Division(s)
Eprints ID
223401
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Item type:Publication, Crowdsourcing und Crowd Work - Neue Formen digitaler Arbeit(Verlag aw&I Wissenschaft und Praxis, 2015); ; Bullinger, Angelika C.Type:book section - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Arbeit und IT: Crowdsourcing und Crowdwork als neue Arbeits- und BeschäftigungsformenType:book sectionVolume:1. Aufl. - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, The Rise of Crowd Aggregators - How Individual Workers Restructure Their Own Crowd(2017-02-12); ; Crowd work has emerged as a new form of digital gainful employment whose nature is still a black box. In this paper, we focus on the crowd workers – a perspective that has been largely neglected by research. We report results from crowd worker interviews on two different platforms. Our findings illustrate that crowd aggregators as new players restructure the nature of crowd work sustainably with different effects on the behavior as well as the existing relationships of crowd workers. We contribute to prior research by developing a theoretical framework based on value chain and work aggregation theories which are applicable in this new form of digital labor. For practice, our results provide initial insights that need to be taken into account as part of the ongoing discussion on fair and decent conditions in crowd work.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Dienstleistungen von der Crowd: Crowdsourcing und Crowd WorkType:newspaper articleVolume:Portfolio-Management im Service - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, When is Crowdsourcing Advantageous? The Case of Crowdsourced Software Testing(Boğaziçi University, 2016); - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Rags to Riches - How signaling behaviour causes a power shift in crowdsourcing marketsCrowdsourcing has emerged as new form of digital work organization. This novel socio-technical ar-rangement changes the organization of work as well as its general nature. In this paper, we focus on the crowdworkers – a perspective that has been largely neglected by crowdsourcing research. We re-port results from crowdworker-interviews on two different platforms. Our research shows that quality signals of crowdworkers increase the bargaining power towards their principals, i.e. the crowdsourcers. As a result, the crowdworkers can reach a turning point of critical bargaining power at which the distribution of power shifts in their favor. We contribute to the literature by unraveling signaling behavior as mechanism influencing bargaining power and thus success in crowdsourcing. Beyond, we develop a theoretical model that indicates a shift in bargaining power over time and im-proves our understanding of crowdsourcing as novel way of organizing digital work. For practice, our results provide guidelines for crowdworkers how to improve their position in bargaining in relation to the crowdsourcer.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Crowdsourcing und Crowd Work - ein Zukunftsmodell der IT-gestützten Arbeitsorganisation?(Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2014); ; ; Hess, ThomasType:book section - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Rate or Trade? Identifying Winning Ideas in Open Idea SourcingInformation 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.Type:journal articleJournal:Information Systems ResearchVolume:27Issue:1Scopus© Citations 93 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Crowd WorkType:journal articleJournal:Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE)Volume:58Issue:4Scopus© Citations 85