1. Cheer the crowd? Exploiting crowdsourcing as
a problem-solving strategy
Miia Kosonen, Kaisa Henttonen
Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland
ISPIM, Helsinki 19.6.2013

2. Research project
Knowledge Protection and Sharing in Global Value Networks, 7/2011 – 6/2013
− different mechanisms for knowledge protection and sharing
− different products & markets (CHN, FIN, USA)
− in workpackage 2, focus on open knowledge sharing mechanisms: online
co-creation and crowdsourcing
Survey of 244 IdeasProject users
ISPIM Barcelona, 2012
ISPIM Symposium, Seoul, 2012
ISPIM Helsinki, 2013

3. Background
Co-innovators and consumerism
• valuable user input into the innovation process
• lead over companies that do not empower customers
Crowdsourcing as a form of distant/broadcast
search (Afuah and Tucci, 2012; Poetz and
Schreier, 2012; Jeppesen and Lakhani, 2010)
Problem-solving effectiveness key to organizational
performance (Nickerson and Zenger, 2004)
Complexity typical for solving innovation-related
problems and tasks

4. When to use crowdsourcing
(Afuah and Tucci, 2012)
Feature Dimensions
Nature of the problem Ease of delineation/transmission
Modularizability
Knowledge required to solve Tacitness/complexity
Effective distance
The crowd Size
Know-how
Motivation
Solutions to be evaluated Type of solution
Number of evaluators
However, an important question remains: after a decision to crowdsource has
been made, what types of facilitating actions does this require from the
company aiming at having benefit from the proposed solutions?

5. Examples of crowdsourcing
CONTEST MODE
COMMUNITY MODE
HYBRID MODE

6. Breeding crowd motivation
1. Provide mentally stimulating tasks
2. Provide timely feedback
“Once you have a prosperous community, you have to give credit back to
its members, by giving attention and taking effort alike.”
3. Facilitate interaction
4. Reward appropriately
5. Build sense of community
6. Select the right communication technologies

7. Putting know-how into action
1. Assess the degree and distribution of know-how
e.g. identifying lead users: netnography, social network visualization
2. Specify tasks/problems on appropriate level
“At times, we have had challenges [contests] with less ideas provided by
the crowd. These have been moments of learning to us: the core things
are, firstly, finding the right community, and secondly, kind of having the
right level of specifying what we are actually looking for. We had to be
more accurate.”
3. Support task interpretation
4. Encourage collaboration, identify and support communititors

8. Summary and implications
Based on the literature review, three case examples and four
background interviews with IdeasProject hosts, we incorporated a
hosting firm’s perspective to study how to facilitate crowd
participation in solving innovation related-tasks.
 Breeding crowd motivation and putting know-how into action
 Requires resourcing, learning from experience, incorporating
crowds also in outlining problems
 Three modes of crowdsourcing opened up; means to facilitate
participation in both contest and community modes
 While community in general is more challenging, it also opens up
better opportunities to co-create together with users.

9. Conclusions
Further research encouraged on
− crowdsourcing innovation-related tasks in general
(Santonen et al., 2012)
− when to use the different modes of crowdsourcing:
which types of problems are best solved by contest,
community, or hybrid settings? (Hutter et al., 2011)
− how to overcome other challenges, i.e. related to the
nature of problems and their solutions, or knowledge
complexity/tacitness typical to innovation-related
tasks? (Afuah and Tucci, 2012)

10. Thank you!
Contact details
Miia Kosonen
Lappeenranta University of Technology
P.O.Box 20, 53851 Lappeenranta
Finland
miia.kosonen@lut.fi
Twitter: @MiiaKosonen