Crowdsourcing Service Innovation Creativity: Environmental Influences and Contingencies

Abstract

To cope with environmental pressures, service firms may utilize crowdsourcing to identify externally-generated ideas to fuel innovation. This research investigates how environmental pressures—customer demandingness, competitive intensity, and technological turbulence—influence firms’ utilization of crowdsourcing for service innovation, and how these factors moderate crowdsourcing’s impact on innovation creativity. By leveraging an attention-based view theoretical model, the results show that competitive intensity and technological turbulence positively affect firms’ usage of crowdsourcing and that environmental pressures interact with crowdsourcing’s influence on innovation creativity. Specifically, customer demandingness accentuates the positive relationship between crowdsourcing and innovation creativity while technological turbulence attenuates this relationship.