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PublicationWhy Incorporating a Platform-Intermediary can Increase Crowdsourcees’ Engagement( 2019)
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PublicationHow Does the Crowdsourcing Experience Impact Participants’ Engagement? An Empirical Illustration.( 2017)
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PublicationA Mixed Method Approach to Understanding Crowdsourcees’ Engagement Behavior( 2017-12-10)
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PublicationRevealing the Impact of the Crowdsourcing Experience on the Engagement Process(Association for Information Systems, 2016-12-11)
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PublicationThe Anatomy of an Engaging Crowdsourcing Experience(Universität St. Gallen, 2020)Crowdsourcing is an emerging global trend. Eighty-five percent of the top hundred global brands employ IT-based platforms to engage with crowds outside the firm, particularly for software testing and new digital services development with consumers. Some companies, such as Starbucks or Netflix, impressively demonstrated the potential of such platforms as a source of innovation and cost savings. However, looking at the overall success rates, research showed that 90 percent of those initiatives fail to engage contributors over time. Hence, the notion of engagement is of utmost importance to better understand how crowdsourcing platforms can be leveraged effectively by firms. The growing body of literature on crowdsourcing takes a traditional product-dominant view, one in which the central purpose of the firm is to outsource activities to develop and improve outputs more efficiently. However, existing research on the phenomenon falls short in understanding the needs of the crowd as a form of social capital. In general, the question of how a firm can employ a service-dominant view to effectively manage such platforms with consumers is understudied in fields like information systems, service research, organizational behavior, and management science. This thesis aims to work toward closing this gap by looking at the Crowdsourcing Experience itself, which every crowdsourcee is exposed to throughout the Crowdsourcing Journey and which needs to be understood to foster engagement. Crowdsourcing Engagement is conceptualized as a process that leads to short and long-term platform responses due to satisfying experiences that aggregate into a commitment state. Multiple empirical data sources have been provided by the Crowdsourcing Consortium, and innovative qualitative and quantitative research methods are applied for this purpose. As an initial step, this thesis proposes a theoretical framework of the IT-enabled engagement process based on literature. This framework is then enriched with empirical findings from assessing multiple crowdsourcing cases with the purpose of testing and improving digital services with consumers. Four different categories of stimuli, which influence crowdsourcees engagement, are derived: 1) Door Openers (e.g., invitation mail); 2) Risk Factors (e.g., the crowdsourcing platform); 3) Game Changers (e.g., social interaction); and 4) Value Adders (e.g., gamification features). In a next step, three deep-dive studies provide surprising insights on the role of one proposed Game Changer, one Risk Factor, and one moderating factor (the incorporation of a Crowdsourcing Intermediary) for engagement formation. Lastly, a modernized perspective on crowdsourcing with consumers, grounded in the service dominant logic, is proposed. It extends the existing body of knowledge in the fields of crowdsourcing and engagement and dissolves contradictory findings from prior studies by overcoming conceptual and methodological weaknesses. The integration of the two rather new phenomena has the advantage of providing knowledge for researchers from the fields of information systems, service research, and consumer behavior. Practical contributions are transformed into an eight-step management framework for creating and maintaining engaging experiences.
