Co-Creation in the Shadow of the Organization: A Comparison of Internal and External Crowds

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is increasingly gaining popularity to leverage the crowd’s potential to develop ideas further through collaboration between crowd members, i.e. through co-creation. Although co-creation patterns are expected to vary, depending on whether a crowd is located within or outside an organization, research lacks insights into how the co-creation behavior within internal and external crowds differs. In contrast to external crowds, we argue that internal crowd members anticipate the consequences of their commitment for the organizational environment in their decision to co-create. We define this behavior as co-creation in the shadow of the organization. Using a unique dataset from two identically designed contests, conducted separately with an internal and an external crowd, our study aims to compare how members of these crowds initiate co-creation. Our results show that internal and external crowd members indeed differ in their co-creation behavior. As suggested, internal crowd members are less likely to form a team, take more time to coordinate their activities, but provide more often constructive feedback than external crowd members. We find that these different co-creation behaviors are strengthened the more uncertainty is associated with the proposed ideas. These results advance our understanding of the co-creation mechanism in general and contribute to the growing research on co-creation in crowds specifically. Since our study is one of the first providing empirical insights on behavioral differences between internal and external crowds, we add to the emerging debate on the advantages and disadvantages of these crowd types for co-creation.