An integrative perspective and analysis for crowdsourcing science and innovation

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a multidisciplinary research area and a technological innovation that represents a rapidly expanding field in which new applications are continually emerging, enabling organizations to leverage the wisdom of the public. Prior studies have emphasized categorizing the field based on qualitative methods and focused more on technology and crowd perspectives. Few studies examine the organizational integration of crowdsourced based science to innovation activities as well as categorize the entire field using quantitative publication analysis. This study aims to examine the process and organizational use of crowdsourcing activities in a comprehensive way, including science and innovation activities, especially identifying the integration of both activities. Based on data from a mixed-method approach, the quantitative analysis's key findings show its usage is majorly in the three domains of innovation, engineering, and science with their underlying main categories and sub-categories. The qualitative analysis's key findings and comparing crowdsourcing science and innovation (SI) show that organizational management is similar. However, organizations' motives in both activities are fundamentally different, but the integration of crowdsourcing science to innovation allows an interactive and iterative process to occur. This study contributes to the field's knowledge by proposing a framework that integrates crowdsourcing activities during the entire innovation process, an organizational crowdsourcing management perspective, theoretically unifying the organizational enablers and barriers for crowdsourcing usage, and methodologically maps the crowdsourcing field.

Date of Award	Mar 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Portsmouth
Supervisor	Sercan Ozcan (Supervisor) & Paul Trott (Supervisor)