Creating Value Through Crowdsourcing: The Antecedent Conditions

The benefits of crowdsourcing are becoming more widely understood and there is a methodological move towards organisations using “participatory models” to engage stakeholder communities and align decision making more closely to the needs of stakeholders. Many tasks can now be distributed to “the crowd” for action. Our research aims to understand the antecedent conditions that inform management decisions to adopt crowdsourcing techniques as a means of value creation. Our preliminary findings suggest that to be successful, three antecedent criteria must be met – the task being crowdsourced must be modular in nature, a community of interest must be engaged, and there needs to be a structural capability within the organisation to be able to facilitate the engagement of the crowd and utilise the output from the crowd in a manner that creates value.