The Future of Crowdsourcing: From Idea Contests to MASSive Ideation
Johann Füller
Julia Hautz
Katja Hutter
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No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else. —Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems cofounder
Groups of people with highly diverse skills and professional backgrounds can often outperform an internal R&D department of a company in coming up with innovations (Tuomi 2003). Hence organizations are looking for ways to collaborate with employees from different departments and organizational backgrounds, as well as with customers, suppliers, and other partners outside the organization’s boundaries. They are increasingly aware that they need to tap into both internal and external knowledge sources to accelerate innovation (Darroch 2005; Leonard-Barton 1995). To connect several thousand innovative people scattered all over the planet, a number of methods and tools such as virtual customer integration (Dahan and Hauser 2002), netnography (Kozinets 1999), and tool kits (Piller and Walcher 2006; Thomke and von Hippel 2002) have been introduced. These tools mainly aim at actively integrating inventive users into the innovation process. Among the most popular and promising forms of open innovation are innovation competitions (Terwiesch and Xu 2008), ideagoras (Tapscott and Williams 2006), and problem-broadcasting platforms like InnoCentive (Lakhani and Jeppesen 2007).
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