What’s in a crowd? Exploring crowdsourced versus traditional customer participation in the innovation process

ABSTRACT

This study explores the emerging crowdsourcing phenomenon, that is, the outsourcing of idea generation to the product users (‘the crowd’), typically via online platforms to interact with many and diverse customers and glean valuable market insights. The study focuses on this phenomenon and the factors that determine the value of crowdsourced customer participation over more traditional market research methods. The authors present the results of an extensive, in-depth qualitative case-study analysis pertaining to the media industry. The authors find that crowdsourced customer participation is not consistently superior in enabling firms to discover how to serve their customers better. Instead, the results unearth a catalogue of seven interrelated value determinants that show where the boundaries of both crowdsourcing and traditional customer participation in innovation lie. These value determinants fall into three main categories: (1) innovation-specific value determinants, (2) firm-specific value determinants, and (3) managerial value determinants.

KEYWORDS:

• Customer participation
• crowdsourcing
• market research methods
• product innovation
• qualitative research

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the support of the participants in this research. The authors thank Robin Canniford, Paul Harrigan, Geoffrey Soutar, Elizabeth Anderson, Jan B. Heide, Mirco Sydow, Roberto Minunno, and Christian Homburg for their help.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use the connotation of ‘customer’ to denote both a consumer and a business customer.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard L. Gruner

Richard L. Gruner is an Assistant Professor in Marketing at the University of Western Australia Business School. His research interests include digital marketing, operations and IT management, and sustainable supply chain management. His work has been published in a number of journals including the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Journal of Cleaner Production and the European Journal of Information Systems.

Damien Power

Damien Power is a Professor of Supply Chain Management at the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne. He is also a Professor of Global Operations Management at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen. His research interests include sustainability, technology use, and operations strategy. He has published in a number of journals including the Journal of Operations Management, Decision Sciences, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Journal of Supply Chain Management, and the European Journal of Information Systems.