Course:LIBR559A/Gassenheimer, J. B., Siguaw, J. A. & Hunter, G. L. (2013)

Citation

Gassenheimer, J. B., Siguaw, J. A. & Hunter, G. L. (2013). Exploring motivations and the capacity for business crowdsourcing. AMS review, 3(4). Available at: https://link-springer-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs13162-013-0055-8.pdf

Annotation

The article explores the motives of crowdsources and crowd on crowdsourcing initiatives.

Crowdsourcing can be defined as the acquisition of external knowledge, from the crowd. Business crowdsourcing is a type of crowdsourcing, which is associated with the provisions of solutions to organization's problems. And the absorptive capacity is the ability of an organization to use externally held knowledge.

Crowdsourcer motivators:

The motivation for creating a crowdsourcing initiative is to acquire new and diverse knowledge, that enables an organization to tackle problems and create innovative solutions. The authors present several initiatives and showing their motivations and outputs. An example is the creation of spaces for the crowd to share their knowledge, which will be used by other customers. By complementing the customer service with the crowd knowledge, the quality and the satisfaction associated with it increases, and also the profits. The crowdsourcing is also related to the competitive advantage of a company, which can absorb and transform the new knowledge into products and services, differentiating the company from others. So, basically, the motivators for the crowdsourcer are: innovation, economic factors and competitive advantage.

Crowd motivators:

There are three fundamental needs associated with the motivation to engage in crowdsourcing initiatives: the autonomy (determine own behavior), competence (ability to influence the environment) and relatedness (feeling connected to people). These needs are represented by intrinsic, internalized extrinsic and extrinsic motives:

• Intrinsic motives: to assist the organization and develop relationships with the other participants.
• Internalized extrinsic motives: are associated with the participation to increase reputation in the community, learn from and teach other and influence.
• Extrinsic motives: related to economic incentives.

One of the crowd's demotivators is the financial aspect, where participants may feel exploited because they do not get paid what they deserve. Usually, initiatives of crowdsourcing pay less than the minimum wage.

The article consisted of a literature review and the novel ideas of it are the identification of what drives crowdsources and crowd to engage in crowdsourcing initiatives, and also aspects that demotivate the participation. The article is relevant to LIS area because through knowing what drives people to engage in crowdsourcing initiatives, and also the demotivators aspects of it, libraries and information organizations that wish to deploy a crowdsourcing will know what to consider when doing that. Because of this article, librarians and managers may know what to do to have a successful crowdsourcing initiative.

Areas, topics and keywords

Crowdsourcing. Motivation. Absorptive capacity.

Page author Paula Arasaki