Exploring IT-Enabled Opportunities for Crowdsourcing Innovation: An Epistemic Stance Perspective

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new theoretical perspective, which we call epistemic stance on novelty, to understand firms’ experimentations with IT-enabled crowdsourcing to organize innovation. Under growing pressures to enhance innovation capacity, firms increasingly explore new opportunities to engage crowds, external to the firm, in the innovation process. Based on an in-depth interpretive study of two innovation consulting firms, we investigate their efforts to consider and take a position toward crowdsourcing. Our findings highlight significant differences in the ways by which these two firms engage with crowdsourcing and the key role of each firm’s attitudes toward the nature of knowledge and pursuit of novelty in this process. To interpret these findings, we develop the epistemic stance perspective. We draw on recent developments in philosophy of science to suggest that taking an epistemic stance entails enacting specific ontological and epistemological beliefs in dynamic ways and gives rise to certain meanings and possibilities for organising innovation through crowdsourcing. Our research makes a contribution by deepening understanding of the ways new open IT-enabled forms of organizing innovation work may emerge.