The role of crowdsourcing in product design: The moderating effect of user expertise and network connectivity

Abstract To meet the challenges of customization and personalized design in the context of the digital economy, increasing numbers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are using crowdsourcing platforms to seek product design innovation. While crowdsourcing has significant potential for eliciting product ideas, it remains unclear whether it can generate high-quality designs for relatively more complex product design tasks. Based on a leading social new product development website Quirky.com, we explore the antecedents of a firm's adoption decision of crowdsourcing, the impact of crowdsourcing on product design quality, and the moderating effect of user expertise and network connectivity by utilizing treatment effect model. The results indicate that: (1) crowdsourcing has a significant positive impact on product design quality; (2) user expertise positively moderates the role of crowdsourcing in product design quality; (3) network connectivity has an inverted U-shaped moderating effect on crowdsourcing and product design quality relationship; (4) the probability of firm's crowdsourcing adoption is negatively correlated with the complexity and reliability of initial product idea but positively correlated with popularity, novelty, and numbers of images. This study not only enriches the crowdsourcing and social network theory; but also provides guidance for crowdsourcing platform firms to better manage the crowdsourcing process and user crowdsourcing communities.