Fostering innovation through collective intelligence: a literature review

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, Collective intelligence (CI) arose as a social phenomenon to assist organizations in managing future uncertainty. It pushes a broad diverse group to come up with new solutions that outperform those uncovered within the organization itself. Accordingly, CI has been widely acknowledged as a means to foster innovation, and develop, and sustain an organization's creative potential. This paper aims to conduct a literature review to examine the existing body of literature regarding the ways collective intelligence improves innovation. The findings emphasized the importance of collective intelligence in fueling a firm’s knowledge and innovation in all of its forms to overcome public and private organizational challenges. Furthermore, our review underlined the mediating role of information technology in taking full advantage of collective intelligence via digital platforms. In addition, our analysis pointed out the multifaceted traits of collective intelligence as reflected in the literature under several terms, including crowdsourcing. Our research revealed several gaps in the current literature, including insufficient analysis and modeling of the relationship between the two concepts. Finally, we concluded our paper by identifying the limits of our research and suggesting avenues for future studies on collective intelligence and innovation.