The Rise of Crowdsourcing in Management Research Organized by: Yuqing (Ching) Ren Natalia Levina August 9, 2010 Academy of Management Annual Meeting

Crowdsourcing The act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call (Jeff Howe 2006)

Crowdsourcing Archetypes Online content networks (iStockphoto) Open Innovation (InnoCentive, TaskCN) Marketplaces for Work ( Amazon Mechanical Turk ) Peer Production and open source (Wikipedia) Corporate Initiatives (Dell IdeaStorm) Open Contest (TopCoder, vWorker)

Five Dimensions and Questions The characteristics of the crowd – Designated or the public, specialty and qualification Monetary compensation to reward the work – Volunteer or paid workers, salary or prize The nature and scope of the task or challenge – How to design the task or define the problem The design of competition processes – Transparency and reputation systems The creation of teams and team collaboration – Accountability, trust, and reward allocation

Four Presentations Open contest design to attract a specific number of solvers and improve performance at TaskCN Task and incentive designs to improve work quality in Amazon Mechanical Turk Reputation systems and contestant performance in software competition at TopCoder Problem definition and knowledge transfer in open innovation at InnoCentive