Taking on Grand Challenges Through Collaborative Crowdsourcing: The Importance of Common Ground for Knowledge Integration

Abstract

Tackling grand challenges calls for collaborative innovation approaches that can gather various stakeholders around a common goal. One such approach receiving growing scholarly attention is collaborative crowdsourcing. By enabling crowds to collaboratively share and integrate their knowledge, perspectives, and partial solutions, collaborative crowdsourcing changes the role of ordinary people from passive receivers to active creators of innovative solutions for addressing grand challenges. However, our understanding of the knowledge sharing and integrating processes in temporary online crowds is limited and calls for further research. Through a netnographic analysis of an online crowdsourcing platform tackling problems around the Covid-19 pandemic, we provide a detailed account of the knowledge integration processes as they unfold on the platform over time. We identify fourteen activities that individuals engage in and relate these activities to six subprocesses that constitute the knowledge integration process on a collaborative crowdsourcing platform for addressing grand challenges. Our insights contribute to the research on collaborative crowdsourcing by showing the importance of crowds establishing common ground, not only around solutions but also around the different aspects of the problem. Furthermore, when addressing grand challenges, connecting contributions emerges as an important intermediate step between the diverging and converging cycles previously identified in crowdsourcing studies. Finally, our article highlights the importance of (collaborative) crowdsourcing initiatives in making participants feel part of something greater by “building a collective.”