The potential of collective intelligence and crowdsourcing for opportunity creation

Abstract

Digital technologies inherently change entrepreneurial processes and outcomes. One theoretical perspective that aims at explaining both is the creation view of opportunities, which proposes iterative social interaction between entrepreneurs and interested stakeholders and the evolutionary nature of opportunities as idiosyncratic. While the discussion on the phenomena of crowdsourcing is scarce in entrepreneurship research on opportunity (co-) creation, it provides enormous potential for the field. Within this paper, we focus on providing a theoretical rational for why and how collective intelligence and crowdsourcing as concrete mechanism works for improving the entrepreneurial cognition process. The paper shows that entrepreneurs can leverage collective intelligence to objectify opportunities by starting a sense making process, persuading interested stakeholders, and mobilising external resources, thus limiting the cognitive constraints and bounds of entrepreneurial agents. We thus contribute to the discourse about how opportunities emerge from interactions between entrepreneurs and their social environment and provide an agenda that may guide future research in the field of digital entrepreneurship.