دانلود رایگان مقاله توسعه سرمایه جمعیت از طریق از منبع یابی جمعیت

Abstract

Traditionally, the term ‘crowd’ was used almost exclusively in the context of people who self-organized around a common purpose, emotion, or experience. Today, however, firms often refer to crowds in discussions of how collections of individuals can be engaged for organizational purposes. Crowdsourcing–—defined here as the use of information technologies to outsource business responsibilities to crowds–—can now significantly influence a firm’s ability to leverage previously unattainable resources to build competitive advantage. Nonetheless, many managers are hesitant to consider crowdsourcing because they do not understand how its various types can add value to the firm. In response, we explain what crowdsourcing is, the advantages it offers, and how firms can pursue crowdsourcing. We begin by formulating a crowdsourcing typology and show how its four categories–—crowd voting, micro-task, idea, and solution crowdsourcing–—can help firms develop ‘crowd capital,’ an organizational-level resource harnessed from the crowd. We then present a three-step process model for generating crowd capital. Step one includes important considerations that shape how a crowd is to be constructed. Step two outlines the capabilities firms need to develop to acquire and assimilate resources (e.g., knowledge, labor, funds) from the crowd. Step three outlines key decision areas that executives need to address to effectively engage crowds.

4. Final thoughts on how to work a crowd

This article offers contributions to both the research and practitioner communities. We hope that our typology–—separating crowdsourcing by the subjective or objective content obtained from the crowd, and then either aggregated or filtered by the organization–—will help scholars develop lenses appropriate forresearch on crowd voting, micro-task crowdsourcing,idea crowdsourcing, and solution crowdsourcing, respectively. Herein, we present the crowd capital perspective (which illustrates in testable form a generalized process model of crowd construction) as well as acquisition and assimilation capabilities, leading ultimately to different forms of crowd capital. It is our hope that this early work on a crowdsourcing process will motivate other researchers to tease apartthe different kinds of capabilities needed for different types of crowdsourcing, and to study in more detailthe differenttypes of crowd capitalthese can create. Furthermore, our work on crowdsourcing may have the potential to inform literature in other management areas. In particular, a firm’s need to construct a crowd based on the similarity of its members is comparable to marketers’ need to segment their markets: to divide a heterogeneous market into homogeneous groups (Wedel & Kamakura, 1999). Future research on how firms form their crowds from an amorphous group of people outside their boundaries might inform segmentation practices (e.g., Yankelovich & Meer, 2006), and vice versa.