Value, in crowdsourcing, is attributed to outcomes such as reducing costs, improving quality through broad participation, generating alternate solutions with increased creativity, and enabling the employment of specialists on an ad-hoc basis. These benefits of crowdsourcing typically reflect the focal firm's perspective and are perceived at a single point in time, either prior to initiating the project or post-hoc. In this study we take a longitudinal and stakeholder-centered approach to examine the process of value (co-)creation through interactions between firm and crowd. We offer a process perspective on emerging value and distinguish between value for firm and value for crowd. In doing so, we close an observed gap in the literature which lacks an overarching understanding of crowdsourcing value creation.

Nowadays, crowdsourcing has become a popular way of sourcing. As intermediaries that connect crowdsourcers and crowds, crowdsourcing platforms integrate state-of-the-art information technologies and specialized organizational functions to host and govern crowdsourcing projects. The extant literature on crowdsourcing has investigated numerous aspects of crowdsourcing platforms. However, a majority of studies are project-oriented and short-term focused. There is a lack of a holistic view of crowdsourcing platforms as enterprises with a developmental perspective. This study aims to address this issue by investigating business sustainability of crowdsourcing platforms. By considering temporal dimensions and multiple interpretations of business sustainability, a conceptual framework is proposed to investigate the sustainability of a crowdsourcing platform by analyzing the key business process, value cocreation, and business development, which is a major theoretical contribution of the study. A case study of LEGO Ideas is presented to illustrate the practical implementation of the proposed framework. Both theoretical and practical implications are respectively discussed.

Crowdsourcing, as a crowd-centered approach, is becoming increasingly popular for organizations to conduct outsourcing, research and development (R&D), and marketing. The effectiveness of a crowdsourcing initiative, as manifested in specific outcomes, depends significantly on the salient characteristics of the configured crowd. This study aims to investigate which business purposes necessitate which crowds with which characteristics. Contributions of this study include: 1) defining a crowd in crowdsourcing by distinguishing the roles of individuals, 2) introducing and defining three crowd attributes to depict the salient characteristics of a crowd, and 3) proposing a typology of eight crowd configurations by combining high or low levels of the three crowd attributes and examining each crowd configuration to highlight the relationships between crowd attributes and crowdsourcing outcomes. Eight mini cases corresponding to the eight crowd configurations are presented to illustrate how crowd configurations were implemented in real-life situations. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed respectively.

As a typical form of value co-creation, crowdsourcing has been increasingly applied by firms to generate business value. By engaging a crowd, a platform, and other stakeholders, a crowdsourcer can foster the co-creation of a portfolio of value for diverse stakeholders. In analyzing the value co-creation in crowdsourcing, we propose a framework by combining the theories and frameworks in value co-creation and crowdsourcing. The framework examines the key stakeholders, joint purpose, engaged value co-creation processes, contributions, bidirectional relationships of the engagement, and perceived value, exhibiting a holistic view of the value co-creation in a crowdsourcing project. Results of the analysis reveal the business performance of the crowdsourcing project and identify areas of improvement regarding business sustainability. This is a major theoretical contribution of this study. The research design applied a case study approach to empirically investigate a crowdsourcing project. Both the theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

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