How Co-creation Processes Unfold and Predict Submission Quality in Crowd-based Open Innovation

Advanced communication and collaboration technologies, supported by more bandwidth and more computing power, coupled with a demand for more rapid innovation, are driving firms toward crowd-based open innovation. In crowd-based open innovation, organizations generally invite novel contributions from outside the boundaries of the firm via an online platform that enables a large, diverse network of contributors to participate. Unfortunately, little is known about how to best structure and manage information coming from crowds outside of the firm and only a fraction of these efforts succeed. Failures are common, in part, because the ideas submitted are not novel and well-refined and because firms cannot absorb the ideas proffered (Wallin and von Krogh, 2010). Although a number of studies examine strategies of organizations and, at the micro-level, motivations of crowdworkers, we know little about how work is coordinated within the crowd and how to design systems to support higher levels of innovation among crowdworkers. Our goal in this research is to provide a better understanding of how workers collaborate in a crowd-based open innovation community and how these collaboration patterns affect innovation outcomes. Diversity, supported by collaboration and co-creation among community members has been said to be central to the benefits attributed to open innovation (Chesbrough et al., 2006; Ullrich and Vladova, 2016). We aim to unpack the micro-processes of co-creation and how diversity is leveraged in crowd-based open innovation.