how to work a crowd: developing crowd capital through crowdsourcing

HOW TO WORK A CROWD: DEVELOPING CROWD CAPITAL THROUGH CROWDSOURCING

Ian P. McCarthyBeedie School of BusinessIan_mccarthy@sfu.ca

Based on the following research:

Prpić, J., Shukla, P. P., Kietzmann, J. H., & McCarthy, I. P. (2015). How to work a crowd: Developing crowd capital through crowdsourcing. Business Horizons, 58(1), 77-85.

Access the full paper here.

Traditionally the term ‘crowd’ was used almost exclusively in the context of people who self-organized around a common purpose, emotion, or experience.

CROWDSOURCING DEFINED

• Today, firms often refer to crowds as “collections of individuals who can be engaged for organizational purposes” (Prpić et al. 2015: 77).

• Crowdsourcing is “the use of information technologies to outsource business responsibilities to crowds” (Prpić et al. 2015: 77).

TYPES OF CROWDSOURCING

Crowd-voting

An organization requests choices between

alternatives and then aggregates the votes

e.g., American Idol

Idea outsourcing

An organization invites ideas about questions and issues and then evaluates the proposed ideas

e.g., Threadless

Micro-task crowdsourcing

An organization breaks a problem or task into smaller tasks and then re-assembles

the completed tasks

e.g., ReCAPTCHA

Solution outsourcing

An organization invites and tests developed solutions to challenges and adopts the best ones

e.g., Netflix Prize

Subjective Content

Objective Content

Aggr

egat

ed

Cont

ributi

ons Filtered

Contributions

Prpić, J., Shukla, P. P., Kietzmann, J. H., & McCarthy, I. P. (2015). How to work a crowd: Developing crowd capital through crowdsourcing. Business Horizons, 58(1), 77-85.

THE THEORY OF CROWD CAPITAL (TCC)

Prpić, J., Shukla, P. P., Kietzmann, J. H., & McCarthy, I. P. (2015). How to work a crowd: Developing crowd capital through crowdsourcing. Business Horizons, 58(1), 77-85.

1. Determine why you want to crowdsource. Why do you want to outsource a task to a crowd?

2. Define the population of individuals needed to perform the task. Who are they? Where are they? Why will they help? How will they help? How diverse is the population? How independent are the individuals?

3. Determine the simple rules that individuals would follow so as to (i) construct the crowd, and (ii) harness the capital of the crowd.

4. Determine the technologies needed to acquire and assimilate the capital from the crowd.

HOW TO WORK A CROWD

CAPTION CONTESTS• Caption contests are a

longstanding form of crowdsourcing.

• Please submit your caption using the SlideShare comment function for this presentation