Crowdsourcing innovation: a proposal for a brokering architecture focused in the innovation needs of SMEs

Crowdsourcing is evolving into powerful outsourcing options for organizations by providing access to the intellectual capital within a vast knowledge community. Innovation brokering services have emerged to facilitate crowdsourcing projects by connecting up companies with potential solution providers within the wider ‘crowd’. Most existing innovation brokering services are primarily aimed at larger organizations, however, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) offer considerable potential for crowdsourcing activity since they are typically the innovation and employment engines in society; they are typically more nimble and responsive to the business environment than the larger companies. SMEs have very different challenges and needs to larger organizations since they have fewer resources, a more limited knowledge and skill base, and immature management practices. Consequently, innovation brokering for SMEs require considerably more support than for larger organizations. This paper identifies the crowdsourcing innovation brokerage facilities needed by SMEs, and presents an architecture that encourages knowledge sharing, development of community, support in mixing and matching capabilities, and management of stakeholders’ risks. Innovation brokering is emerging as a novel business model that is challenging concepts of the traditional value chain and organizational boundaries.

Crowdsourcing innovation intermediaries functions

Open innovation is a hot topic in innovation management. Its basic premise is open up the innovation process. The innovation process, in general sense, may be seen as the process of designing, developing and commercializing a novel product or service to improve the value added of a company. The development of Web 2.0 tools facilitates this kind of contributions, opening space to the emergence of crowdsourcing innovation initiatives. Crowdsourcing is a form of outsourcing not directed to other companies but to the crowd by means of an open call mostly through an Internet platform. Innovation intermediaries, in general sense, are organizations that work to enable innovation, that just act as brokers or agents between two or more parties. Usually, they are also engaged in other activities like inter-organizational networking and technology development and related activities. A crowdsourcing innovation intermediary is an organization that mediates the communication and relationship between the seekers – companies that aspire to solve some problem or to take advantage of any business opportunity – with a crowd that is prone to give ideas based on their knowledge, experience and wisdom. This paper identifies and analyses the functions to be performed by an intermediary of crowdsourcing innovation through grounded theory analyses from literature. The resulting model is presented and explained. The resulting model summarizes eight main functions that can be performed by a crowdsourcing process, namely, diagnoses, mediation, linking knowledge, community, evaluation, project management, intellectual property governance and marketing and support. These functions are associated with a learning cycle process which covers all the crowdsourcing activities that can be realized by the broker.

Ontology methodology building criteria for crowdsourcing innovation intermediaries

Crowdsourcing innovation intermediaries are organizations that mediate the communication and relationship between companies that aspire to solve some problem or to take advantage of any business opportunity with a crowd that is prone to give ideas based on their knowledge, experience and wisdom. A significant part of the activity of these intermediaries is carried out by using a web platform that takes advantage of web 2.0 tools to implement its capabilities. Thus, ontologies are presented as an appropriate strategy to represent the knowledge inherent to this activity and therefore the accomplishment of interoperability between machines and systems. In this paper we present an ontology roadmap for developing crowdsourcing innovation ontology of the intermediation process. We start making a literature review on ontology building, analyze and compare ontologies that propose the development from scratch with the ones that propose reusing other ontologies, and present the criteria for selecting the methodology. We also review enterprise and innovation ontologies known in literature. Finally, are taken some conclusions and presented the roadmap for building crowdsourcing innovation intermediary ontology.