مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد نحوه طراحی و مدیریت مدل های کسب و کار بر اساس جمعیت

مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Practitioners and researchers increasingly have identified crowdsourcing as a viable strategy to gather creative ideas and solutions, make decisions, and outsource small tasks (Prpic´, Shukla, Kietzmann, & McCarthy, 2015). So far, the focus has been primarily on how firms can capture the aggregated wisdom of the crowd (Surowiecki, 2005) for their business challenges. Over recent years, however, firms from different industries have started to develop new business models that fundamentally integrate crowds in value creation logic. The emergence of these crowd-based business models is both driven by advances in internet-based technologies (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, & Silvestre, 2011) and a shift in the role of consumers toward becoming so-called ‘prosumers’ (Ritzer, 2014).

Crowd-based business models (CBBMs) are generally characterized by (1) the integration of contributors from outside the traditional firm boundaries, (2) the exploitation of technologies such as digital peer-to-peer platforms, and (3) the transfer of value creating activities to a crowd (Kohler, 2015). This requires the firm to open certain resources and processes to external contributors, often resulting in a strong interaction with these contributors and their resources. The activity of these contributors can range from conducting microtasks to creating and delivering entire products and services to the firm’s customers. In this sense, CBBMs place even more importance on the crowd than traditional forms of crowdsourcing (Kohler, 2015).

Due to their inherent value co-creation with crowds, CBBMs can lead to novel and superior value propositions. Wikipedia is a case in point. Originally considered a lower-cost and lower-quality alternative to established encyclopedias,the founding team has built effective systemsto engage and use a crowd of content contributors to review and update its articles constantly. As such, the platform soon developed into an exclusively comprehensive and upto-date source of information. The rise of Wikipedia provided an initial confirmation of the power of collective intelligence for crowd-based value creation. Le´vy (1997, p. 13) defines collective intelligence as: A form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills.. . The basis and goal of collective intelligence is mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities.

In simple terms, the concept of collective intelligence builds on the idea that ‘‘[n]o one knows everything, everyone knows something’’ (Le´vy, 1997, p. 13). As Wikipedia and other examples have shown, there exists a large potential for organizations to leverage the intelligence of individuals outside their boundaries. Or, as Sun Microsystem’s co-founder Bill Joy aptly formulated in what is now known as Joy’s Law: ‘‘No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else’’ (Lakhani & Panetta, 2007, p. 2).