Crowdsourcing - Take on Goliath : Motivating people to participate in Crowdsourcing

Abstract: Introduction: From the start-up, the Internet has allowed easier, cheaper and more widespread communication between different parties. New ways in conducting business have emerged thanks to the Internet, such as Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing makes an open call to a group of peers, where the peers contribute to a final product. However, motivating these peers could be troublesome. Thus, there is a question in how to engage a crowd to participate in Crowdsourcing in order to create some sort of exchange to strive for a mutually beneficial relationship that makes the crowd willing to participate in Crowdsourcing. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to find how different motivating factors affect Participation in explicit Crowdsourcing. Methods: The design of the research conducted in this thesis was a quantitative survey that investigated motivating factors for the members of the company Company X. The survey was sent out threw Company X own site to their members and there were 82 complete answers collected. However, only 73 questionnaires were analyzable due to previous participation. The results gathered from the survey were analyzed with the help of seven hypotheses. Results: Monetary Awards, the Challenge of Problem Solving, and Peer Pressure were found to have a positive effect on Participation. Attention, Recognition, and the Ability of completing a Problem Solving process indicated that there are tendencies of a positive relationship with Participation, but it was not possible to draw any conclusions from these concepts. The results also indicated that having a Competition, or competitive environment could have a negative effect on Participation. Conclusion: The results show that there are some major differences between the results from studies dealing with implicit Crowdsourcing and innovation contests. The general nature of an explicit Crowdsourcing community is speculated to be more friendly and helpful than an implicit Crowdsourcing platform due to the necessary collaboration of explicit Crowdsourcing. Monetary incentives might be what draws the eye of a member in the beginning - although this is not tested -, and this is also one factor that might be motivating people the most in an explicit Crowdsourcing community. Nevertheless, the factors that could have effects on Participation in explicit Crowdsourcing were Monetary Awards, Ability, Competition, and Peer Pressure.