MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Make Your Crowd Smart

A framework for tailoring your crowdsourcing approach to the complexity of your innovation challenge.

Facing ever-increasing pressure to innovate, some companies turn to crowdsourcing for new ideas. Many crowdsourcing efforts, however, fall short of expectations or are abandoned.

There is a common misconception that there is only one approach to crowdsourcing, but asking crowds to address problems that they’re poorly suited to solve leads to many crowdsourcing failures. Our research suggests instead that there are multiple approaches to crowdsourcing that are appropriate for tasks of differing scope and complexity. Our smart crowds framework of three distinct types of crowdsourcing provides guidance for managers wishing to address business problems and boost innovation opportunities through crowdsourcing.

About the Author

Christoph Riedl (@criedl) is a visiting scholar at Yale University and associate professor of information systems at Northeastern University, where he holds a joint appointment between the D’Amore-McKim School of Business and the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Victor P. Seidel is an associate professor at Babson College, a TECH fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and an associate scholar at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. Anita Williams Woolley is an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University. Gerald C. Kane (@profkane) is a visiting scholar at Harvard Business School and a professor of information systems at Boston College.

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