Crowdsourcing a wellspring of value co-creation: an integration of social capital and organisational learning mechanisms
ISSN: 0368-492X
Article publication date: 18 November 2022
Issue publication date: 2 January 2024
Abstract
Purpose
With the advent of Internet technologies, shorter product life cycles and increasing competition, organisations have started looking for innovation sources outside the organisational boundaries. The external community of crowds can be used as a valuable source of co-creation in a company's innovation process to generate value. Despite its growing popularity, organisations often face difficulty capturing value from crowdsourcing due to the lack of proper mechanisms behind crowdsourcing-based value co-creation between a crowd and an organisation and their impact on organisational learning and innovation performance. The present study seeks to understand the crowdsourcing-based co-creation mechanism that influences knowledge transfer effectiveness and the organisation's absorptive capacity, resulting in improved innovation performance.
Design/methodology/approach
The model was empirically tested using online survey data received from 300 managers of IT firms. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to test the model.
Findings
The empirical results reveal that crowdsourcing-based value co-creation causes structural, cognitive and relational linkages between a crowd and a firm, among which crowdsourcing-based cognitive linkage contributes more to organisational value capture. Further, an organisation's effective knowledge transfer and absorptive capacity play an important role in influencing the crowdsourcing-based-co-creation organisational learning-innovation performance framework.
Originality/value
This is the first and foremost study that has developed an integrated model using social capital dimensions to understand the entire mechanism behind crowdsourcing-based value co-creation between a crowd and an organisation and their impact on organisational learning and innovation performance. The study provides organisations with theoretical and practical implications of using crowdsourcing as a value co-creation tool and its effects on enhancing organisational learning and value capture.
Keywords
Citation
Mishra, D. and Maheshwari, N. (2024), "Crowdsourcing a wellspring of value co-creation: an integration of social capital and organisational learning mechanisms", Kybernetes, Vol. 53 No. 1, pp. 424-450. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-04-2022-0580
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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