Crowdsourcing Intermediaries and Problem Typologies: An Explorative Study

Web-based intermediaries that offer crowdsourcing services represent a new and promising way through which firms can leverage the power of a crowd to sustain their innovation performance. However, limited attention has been devoted thus far to understanding the relationship between the intermediaries architecture, i.e., how they deliver their service, and the innovation problems they are designed to solve. Based on an empirical base of 7 in-depth case studies, two distinct architectures, namely competition and competence searching, will be described in the paper; it will be demonstrated that each type is designed to solve specific classes of innovation problems. The paper presents important implications both for firms and web-based intermediaries. On the one hand, firms should collaborate with the web-based intermediary which presents the architecture that best fits the innovation problem to be solved. On the other hand, web-based intermediaries should be designed in coherence with the problems at hand.