Motivations of the "Crowd" in crowdsourcing

• Main Author: Koh, Eva
• Other Authors: Dr Pee Loo Geok
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Library and information science
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/65975
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Knowledge creation is commonly defined as the generation of insights from information. Traditionally, an organisation would create knowledge by harnessing knowledge from its internal staff. However, as the boundaries of an organisation becomes more fluid over the years due to advancements in information communication technology’s most popular invention of the internet, generation of insights from information has been increasingly sourced from the online community, through an activity widely known as crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is fundamentally about making use of the knowledge of the crowd beyond an organisation’s boundaries to fulfil agendas usually related to commerce. This dissertation argues firstly, that crowdsourcing be recognised as a pertinent activity for organisation knowledge creation by explaining how the activity of crowdsourcing is an expansion of the knowledge creation process in an organisation. Following that, however, it will highlight the difference between knowledge sources within the organisation and knowledge sources beyond the traditional boundaries, arguing that knowledge sources beyond the traditional boundaries behave more like entrepreneurs than the salaried workers in said organisation. This dissertation will proceed to review existing motivations for crowdsourcing and propose to consider instead, the motivations behind entrepreneurship to provide more insights to motivations behind crowdsourcing in the context of knowledge creation, more specifically on the potential to operationalise the findings. As prior research has considered motivations for crowdsourcing from the business perspective and examined motivations from a behavioural perspective, this dissertation aims instead, to contribute to existing studies of crowdsourcing from a knowledge perspective and introduce a new angle for examining crowdsourcing motivation from a business perspective. This dissertation examined 105 blog interviews of selected participants from four crowdsourcing platforms which produced valuable knowledge to identify motivations for participating in crowdsourcing. Results indicated that knowledge sources in crowdsourcing are motivated by similar factors related to entrepreneurs and that knowledge sources that indicated as being motivated by work and social motivations (push factors) perform better than those indicated as motivated by independence and monetary motivations (pull factors).