مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد چالش مدنی ناخوشایند با جمعیت نوآورانه

مقاله سال 2017

Today, many firms seek to establish themselves as leaders in civic innovation by developing novel solutions for concerns such as mobility, energy, and food safety (Frost & Sullivan, 2014). To establish leadership in innovation, firms pioneer the exploration of new civic opportunities (Cisco, 2014; IBM,2014; Maerivoet et al., 2012), hoping to gain a competitive edge as based on their unique insights regarding how to address particular civic challenges (Williamson & De Meyer, 2012).

Developing such an innovative advantage is, however, not easy. Civic challenges represent so-called ‘wicked’ problems that are influenced by factors in multiple and often contradictory ways (Rittel & Webber, 1973; Simon, 1962). Wicked problems are unsolvable in the sense that they do not have objectively optimal solutions; any solution values will be deeply embedded in the problem’s local social context (Camillus, 2008; Conklin, 2005). Despite the attention given to wicked problems by public policy and urban planning experts, a lack of insight exists regarding how corporations can develop innovation opportunities for wicked civic challenges–—processes that would require firms to align their own corporate agendas with the broader interests of their local innovation ecosystems. These local networks of firms, governments, and citizens play an important role in developing and delivering new solutions for civic challenges (Williamson & De Meyer, 2012).

In this article, we focus on firm-sponsored civic innovation crowdsourcing as a process that is advantageous to firms. Using the public, firms may develop unique knowledge groups to generate novel solutions to wicked civic problems (Almirall, Lee, & Majchrzak, 2014; Prpic´, Shukla, Kietzmann, & McCarthy, 2015). Herein, we investigate the YouCity Challenge sponsored by Bombardier, a large mobility infrastructure provider. Under this initiative, Bombardier recruited a public crowd of about 900 individuals from around the globe via an open call and asked them to develop new urban mobility solutions for cities of the future. Harnessing the knowledge of this crowd, Bombardier acquired hundreds of unique insights and conceptual solutions. This pool of knowhow represented a valuable extra-organizational asset that Bombardier could access and use to develop visionary solutions capable of establishing the firm as a leader in civic innovation in the area of urban mobility. Indeed, according to Martin Ertl, chief innovation officer of Bombardier (2014), the crowdsourcing initiative spurred Bombardier’s strategic goal of ‘‘moving away from simply responding to customer inquiries and tenders. . . . to writ[ing] a new chapter in public transportation.’’