دانلود رایگان مقاله چالش های مدنی ناخوشایند با یک جمعیت نوآورانه

Abstract

Civic challenges such as urban mobility and energy problems offer new corporate innovation opportunities. However,such challenges are wicked and difficult to tame. They require novel solutions that account for and integrate contradictory perspectives within the local innovation ecosystem of firms, governments, and citizens. This article presents a successful civic innovation crowdsourcing project case study, in which multinational firm Bombardier encouraged a global civic crowd to co-create visionary solutions to the challenge of future mobility in crowded cities around the world. Bombardier recruited a global crowd of 900 individuals and facilitated the citizen development of more than 215 solutions of unique firm value. We explore the process and outcome of this crowdsourcing project and derive actionable design principles for a three-phased civic innovation crowdsourcing process including: (1) crowd construction, (2) crowd knowledge acquisition, and (3) crowd knowledge assimilation. This process enables the crowd to integrate members’ diverse and contradictory knowledge proactively at both the team and individual levels. Additionally, the crowd is able to balance extension of existing local solutions and exploration of path-breaking technologies and solution concepts. # 2016 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

3. Civic innovation crowdsourcing: A new way to tame wicked problems?

Crowdsourcing describes an online, distributed problem-solving model under which organizations employ IT to outsource an organizational function to a strategically defined population of human and non-human actors in the form of an open call (Kietzmann, 2017). In this article, we focus on firmsponsored innovation crowdsourcing efforts wherein firms aim to create corporate innovation opportunities. Civic innovation is a new domain to which such firm-sponsored crowdsourcing can be applied. Firm-sponsored civic innovation crowdsourcing entailsthe firm focusing on a public crowd composed of human actors directly or indirectly affected by a particular civic challenge, to the end of harnessing knowledge about this civic challenge. Digital technologies play a central role as they not only lower participation costs but also create a variety of alternatives for designing the crowdsourcing process and supporting social interactions among strangers (Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2013). At first glance, civic innovation crowdsourcing appears to be a suitable mode for taming wicked civic challenges, as it responds to Rittel’s (1972) call for direct involvement of diverse actors and the consideration oftheirsubjective perspectives. However, we argue that whether a firm can tame a wicked civic challenge successfully depends on how the two conditions, integration and contextualization, are met. These conditions need to be considered across three major crowdsourcing activities (Prpic´ et al., 2015; Zahra & George, 2002): 1. Constructing the crowd by defining its nature and either selecting existing crowds or recruiting new crowds; 2. Acquiring knowledge from a crowd by designing the solution development process; and 3. Assimilating the knowledge from the crowd by integrating the crowd-based knowledge into organizational capabilities. Our analysis of Bombardier’s YouCity Challenge serves as a representative case study of a firmsponsored civic innovation crowdsourcing project. It provides further insight into how design of the crowdsourcing process can meet the two conditions of successful wicked problem solving: knowledge integration and contextualization (Yin, 2003).