Formulating tasks for the crowd. An empirical investigation of design contests
Nunzia Coco, Anna Comacchio · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2016
There is an increasing interest in online crowdsourcing contest as a channel of innovation for companies, which implies new managerial challenges. However, research to date has a limited knowledge on how the relationship between the organization idea seeker and the solvers occurs, specifically little is known on how the task outsourced is framed. The present study explores design contests and focuses on how the problem is formulated as mechanism to effectively engage the community of designers. We developed a qualitative analysis and content analysis of 50 tasks launched by 37 firms through a successful design crowdsourcing platform engaging a community of 60,000 designers and more than active 3,000 contributors. We show how the task is framed in four dimensions: technology, users experience, corporate identity, creativity, we describe the narrative used to communicate them and we identify three patterns of combination of the four dimensions. Our findings provide exploratory evidence on how a problem is framed in a crowdsourcing contest in order to effectively stimulate the solvers to invest their efforts and resources to generate creative solutions that are aligned with the firm requirements.