Unleashing the Crowd

Ann Majchrzak is Chaired Professor of Business Administration and Digital Innovation at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, USA. She is an internationally-known scholar in the fields of management, organization science, and information systems, as well as publishing in top practitioner journals.  This is her fourth book.Arvind Malhotra is H. Allen Andrews Professor of Entrepreneurial Education and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA. He is an expert on innovation processes, inter-organizational knowledge management, and virtual teams having published in many top-tier academic and practice oriented journals.

“This book is written in a unique, lucid, story-telling style that caters to both practitioners seeking tangible tactics for enhancing their use of the crowd and scholars seeking to understand the state of the crowdsourcing literature and the data and methods necessary to advance such research. ... The transformation sparked by this book will further ignite the imagination of practitioners and researchers of innovation alike as to the potential of the crowd.” (Daniel Armanios and Huiyan Zhang, Administrative Science Quarterly, November 6, 2020)

• 1. What is Crowdsourcing for Innovation?.- 2. Our Research on Comparing Idea Sharing.- 3. Practice #1: Minimally Committed Knowledge Baton Passers.- 4. Practice #2: Crowds Offering a Variety of Types of Knowledge Are More Innovative Than Crowds Suggesting More Ideas.- 5. Practice #3: Amplify Creative Associations of Knowledge       Fragments.- 6. Practice #4: Reconstructing Needs for Creative Associations.- 7. Practice #5: Allowing the Crowd to Play Any Innovation-Enabling They Choose.- 8. Tying it All Together: A Theory of Collective Production of Innovation to Inspire Future Research.- 9. Designing Technology Platforms for Collective Co-Production: Advice When Selecting Crowdsourcing Platforms.- 10. Unleashing the Crowd: Overcoming the Managerial Challenges.- 11. Final Words: What’s the Future: Managing Organizations as Crowds Enabled by Super-Connectivity and Big Data.