Crowdsourcing as Lego: Unpacking the Building Blocks of Crowdsourcing Collaboration Processes

Crowdsourcing refers to the use of technologies to gather the collective effort and wisdom from an undefined group of online users for organizational innovation and/or problem solving. While the idea holds a lot of potential, its implementation can be thwarted by an ill design and management of the collaboration processes. Therefore, studies on crowdsourcing collaboration processes are important for the advancement of the field. We argue that studying this aspect of crowdsourcing can benefit from the modular view of collaboration processes provided by Vreede et al.’s (2009) six collaboration pattern framework. We propose to analyze current popular crowdsourcing websites through this framework and perform cluster analyses. We expect that our study will provide insights into existing practices of crowdsourcing collaboration and inform future research on crowdsourcing collaboration