Consumers’ Non-Participation in Creative Crowdsourcing: Exploration Through the Lenses of Meaning of Work: An Abstract

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is the consumers’ participation at the accomplishment of a task, traditionally performed by the internal employees (Howe 2006). Examples are proposing innovative ideas, contributing to product development or solving complex problems. Consumers may also engage in creative tasks (e.g., ad creation, logo design, packaging design), which constitutes the popular practice of creative crowdsourcing. The value and success of a creative crowdsourcing initiative require attracting sufficient numbers of participants (Hopkins 2011). This remains a persistent issue (Faullant et al. 2016): the majority of the crowd does not participate. If crowdsourcers are to be considered as workers (Cova and Dalli 2009; Rieder and Vos 2010), they must be managed and motivated. Traditional management principles, such as recruitment, hierarchy, and internal coordination, might not apply here. Therefore, this research addresses a pressing question: why may people be reluctant to participate in creative crowdsourcing and what might encourage them to participate? As the crowd is heterogenous, composed of professionals/experts in the creative tasks and others, rather ordinary/amateur consumers (Brabham 2008, 2012), this research examines the meaning that potential participants, both creative professionals and ordinary consumers, assign to their nonparticipation. To this aim, we mobilize the theoretical framework of the meaning of work (Rosso et al. 2010) borrowed from human resources literature.