Serial Integration, Real Innovation: Roles of Diverse Knowledge and Communicative Participation in Crowdsourcing

Abstract

Despite a burgeoning public and scholarly interest on open innovation and crowdsourcing, how to enable members of online temporary crowd to maintain knowledge integration and innovation remains underexplored. This study seeks to understand the ways in which online crowd members collectively generate more innovative and serial integrative solutions to crowdsourced open innovation challenges. Analyzing 3,200 unique posts generated by 486 participants of 21 organization-sponsored online crowdsourcing innovation challenges, this research demonstrates that crowd members contribute more innovative solutions when being exposed to explicitly shared diverse knowledge, and that crowd members’ communicative participation acts as a catalyst for the production of both innovation and serial knowledge integration. Findings suggest that managers who seek to generate knowledge integration and innovation should endeavor to implement systems that afford high-level communicative participation, as well as encourage crowd members to make their diverse knowledge explicit while minimizing their cognitive load in knowledge sharing.