How to Manage Crowdsourcing Platforms Effectively?

What is it about?

To profit from crowdsourcing, organizations can engage in four different approaches: microtasking, information pooling, broadcast search, and open collaboration. This article presents 21 governance mechanisms that can help organizations manage their crowdsourcing platforms. It investigates the effectiveness of these governance mechanisms in 19 case studies and recommends specific configurations of these mechanisms for each of the four crowdsourcing approaches. Also, it offers guidance to organizations that host a crowdsourcing platform by providing recommendations for implementing governance mechanisms into their platforms and building up governance capabilities for crowdsourcing.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Academic Scholarship ------------------------------------------------------- For many organizations, crowdsourcing has become an important approach for tapping into the talent, resources, and distributed workforce of Internet users. Existing literature considers the governance of crowdsourcing platforms as pivotal challenge. However, it offers no guidance to academics and practitioners for managing crowdsourcing platforms. Our paper thus presents 21 governance machanisms for crowdsourcing and elaborates on effective configurations of them for four different types of crowdsourcing. ------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Management Practice ------------------------------------------------------- Our article shows that crowdsourcing is not crowdsourcing. There are four different types of crowdsourcing and we show how they need to be managed differently. We help organizations to better understand their crowdsourcing approaches and to identify and implement appropriate governance mechanisms that help them manage their crowdsourcing platforms more effectively. ---------------------------- Author Perspective ---------------------------- We started this research project on effective governance for crowdsourcing because we did recognize that many organizations have difficulties in managing their crowdsourcing platforms - particularly if the organizations' crowdsourcing platforms were succesful and attracted many participants in a short time frame. Sometimes, they get eaten up by their success. At the same time, the academic literature is very scarce on this topic although many papers acknowledge that there is a strong need for better understanding governance in crowdsourcing.