Changing the Innovation Game - Crowdsourcing in Incumbent Firms

Crowdsourcing is an emergent interdisciplinary theory and methodology, which in recent years has become widely diffused, raising significant questions in the innovation management literature concerning the adoption of crowdsourcing as an open innovation practice. Building on seminal research on open innovation adoption in large organizations (Chesbrough and Brunswicker, 2013; 2014), the current study presents qualitative findings on the innovation practices and strategies of incumbent firms transitioning from traditional innovation to crowdsourcing for open innovation. We discuss the impact of crowdsourcing technologies and methodologies on 1) the innovation processes, 2) the innovation content and 3) the overall scope of innovation to discover different stages of maturity in the innovation governance structures of incumbent firms (Deschamps & Nelson, 2014). Our study thus contributes to research on the firm side of crowdsourcing, providing much needed insights into the processes, procedures and structures that support the implementation of crowdsourcing for open innovation (Lüttgens et al., 2014).