Content area
Full Text
Abstract: In recent years crowdsourcing has increased in popularity as a method for gathering ideas for new innovations and providing solutions to existing problems. This means that firms apply the wisdom of crowds for certain tasks and challenges. Various crowdsourcing initiatives and platforms seem to provide new channels and ways to enable this in practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine how business-to-business (B2B) firms can interact with different groups of contributors in order to receive new ideas, feedback and solutions for improving their products and services. Based on theoretical conceptualization, which is combined with empirical evidence, we propose a layered framework for approaching crowdsourcing in a B2B context. The empirical results of this paper reveal benefits but also practical challenges to overcome before crowdsourcing can be effectively utilized in the B2B sector.
Keywords: Crowdsourcing; business-to-business; innovation process; new ideas; product development; layers; case studies; conceptual framework.
1 Introduction
Traditionally, firms have relied upon their internal R&D to increase their innovation capabilities, but, according to a recent literature review by (Johannessen & Olsen, 2010), there is an increasing focus on both open innovations and customer-driven innovations. This means that information, knowledge, and competence can be increasingly found outside the boundaries of a firm. In this paper, while acknowledging such a possibility, we argue that new innovations can also originate within an intra-organizational context where every employee can be a source of new knowledge and innovation. Thus, innovation is no longer the task of the R&D department or the design and engineering units. Accordingly, we apply an open innovation approach at the intra-organizational level, labeling this "internal crowdsourcing." We also introduce other layers of crowdsourcing; based on these layers, we develop a comprehensive framework for crowdsourcing in a B2B context. Despite the growing interest in using crowdsourcing for problem solving (Jeppesen and Lakhani, 2010; Chesbrough, 2011), idea development (Howe, 2008; Magnusson, 2009), or even brand creation (Burmann, 2010), there is still only limited knowledge about how crowdsourcing might be used to facilitate innovation processes inB2B firms. Thus, the motivation of this paper is to analyze how B2B firms can activate both internal and external sources of innovation to create new ideas and solve problems. In other words, the main focus of this...