Why your company might fail at crowdsourcing

With his dissertation Crowdsourcing for Innovation: Unpacking Motivational, Knowledge and Relational Mechanisms of Innovative Behavior in Crowdsourcing Platforms, Oguz Ali Acar found that using larger amounts of monetary rewards to motivate the crowd is not effective at all under certain circumstances. Some crowd members are motivated by prosocial reasons, such as wanting to help others, in which case money will not be effective, and could even backfire.

In addition to helping others, crowds also engage in creative activities because of other non-monetary reasons: they enjoy solving problems and creating ideas, they want to learn new things and they want to gain reputation for their contributions. It is of great importance to acknowledge and take into consideration such diversity in motivations in order to effectively encourage the crowd to engage in creative activities. 

Oguz Ali Acar also found that being an expert in a certain field of knowledge does not necessarily contribute to a better performance. Expertise only has a positive effect on performance when crowd members also look into a wide variety of knowledge domains for solving the problem. Although this kind of broad search was required for the performance-enhancing effects of expertise, breadth of the search was not enough on its own. For such positive effects, experts should also be shallow in the problem domain and those outside of it, but should be deep in domains that are related to the problem domain such as those at the boundaries of the problem domain. Organizers of crowdsourcing initiatives can benefit from these findings by encouraging specific approaches for solving problems.

Third, Acar reveals some members of the crowd might fear potential opportunistic behaviour which can be a critical factor determining success or failure of crowdsourcing initiative as members of the crowd  are unlikely to share their valuable knowledge when they fear their ideas being misused. Specifically, women and older people have significantly less fears due to potential opportunistic behaviour when disclosing their knowledge. In other words, young males experience the highest levels of fears, and this is the largest demographic group in most of the crowdsourcing platforms. What business can learn from this is that certain groups of users in crowdsourcing platforms need more attention to be motivated to disclose their ideas and solutions. Companies might benefit from being transparent about what happens with the ideas and solutions shared by the crowd, and from taking a proactive approach to inform male and younger participants regarding how the potential opportunistic behaviour will be avoided.