Motivations of the "Crowd" in crowdsourcing

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 informa...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Koh, Eva
Other Authors: Dr Pee Loo Geok
Format: Theses and Dissertations
Language:English
Published: 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10356/65975
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
id sg-ntu-dr.10356-65975
record_format dspace
spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-659752019-12-10T14:11:39Z Motivations of the "Crowd" in crowdsourcing Koh, Eva Dr Pee Loo Geok Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information DRNTU::Library and information science 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). Master of Science (Knowledge Management) 2016-02-11T07:49:08Z 2016-02-11T07:49:08Z 2016 Thesis http://hdl.handle.net/10356/65975 en Nanyang Technological University 59 p. application/pdf
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
country Singapore
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic DRNTU::Library and information science
spellingShingle DRNTU::Library and information science
Koh, Eva
Motivations of the "Crowd" in crowdsourcing
description 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).
author2 Dr Pee Loo Geok
author_facet Dr Pee Loo Geok
Koh, Eva
format Theses and Dissertations
author Koh, Eva
author_sort Koh, Eva
title Motivations of the "Crowd" in crowdsourcing
title_short Motivations of the "Crowd" in crowdsourcing
title_full Motivations of the "Crowd" in crowdsourcing
title_fullStr Motivations of the "Crowd" in crowdsourcing
title_full_unstemmed Motivations of the "Crowd" in crowdsourcing
title_sort motivations of the "crowd" in crowdsourcing
publishDate 2016
url http://hdl.handle.net/10356/65975
_version_ 1681035727885828096