The knowledge-performance paradox in crowdsourcing: The role of related and unrelated knowledge
Mark Boons, Daan Alexander Stam, Harry G. Barkema · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2013
By using an open call for contributions, crowdsourcing enables organizations to extend the search for ideas on future innovations far beyond their organizational boundaries, allowing organizations to tap into a wide range of knowledge bases and skill sets. But while crowdsourcing may help organizations gather novel ideas, organizations may also find it more difficult to integrate these ideas with their current knowledge bases and turning them into actual innovations. Contributors to crowdsourced creative problem-solving tasks should not only come up with novel ideas, but they should also be able to relate their ideas to what the organization already knows. Paradoxically, this would require these individuals to possess knowledge that is unrelated to the organization’s knowledge base (to come up with novel ideas), but also related (to relate these ideas to the organization). In this paper, we provide a solution for this paradoxical relationship between individuals’ knowledge bases and their performance on creative problem- solving tasks. We analyze more than 6000 contributions to 120 crowdsourced creative problem-solving challenges and show the importance of considering the joint effects of an individual’s unrelated and related knowledge bases on creative problem- solving performance. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice.