Crowdsourcing Processes and Performance Outcomes

Crowdsourcing has become a prominent method for organizations to search for external knowledge as part of their innovation process. In doing so, organizations first set up an innovation contest in which they post a problem for participants to solve. Participants can then either work on a solution alone or cooperate with other participants. Subsequently, organizations evaluate the submitted solutions and attempt to turn the best of them into innovations. Much of the prior literature on crowdsourcing and innovation contests, however, treats competition and cooperation as two separate dimensions. Hence, we know little about how they interact, how this interaction plays out in terms of performance implications and under what conditions crowdsourcing participants would actually cooperate with their competitors. Further, prior literature offers conflicting evidence on the performance outcomes translating these crowdsourcing inputs into innovation performance on a firm level. This thesis addresses these issues in three chapters.