Crowdsourcing. Essential Factors for successful Crowdsourcing in Product Innovation in Web 2.0

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,3, Westfälische Hochschule Gelsenkirchen, Bocholt, Recklinghausen, language: English, abstract: At large, innovation is a key factor for the success and persistence of organizations in today's business. In order to develop successful innovation, information of two kinds is needed; information based on customers' and the market's needs, as well as information on how to transform the gained knowledge into corresponding products (Diener and Piller, 2011). The paradigm of Crowdsourcing can be applied to obtain both kinds of essential information enabled through direct interaction with customers and takers, providing an enhanced inflow of intelligence.

The work at hand deals with Crowdsourcing and particularly crowd-based product innovation. Crowdsourcing is a relatively new conceptualized paradigm, which is why the literature does not offer countless research papers on the topic and the market is not overloaded with companies applying the concept, although the theory is very promising. Nonetheless, not all companies who have ventured the step towards Crowdsourcing have experienced positive outcomes: on the contrary, some encountered rants from the crowd, as well as image losses (Papsdorf and Voß, 2009).

The first purpose of this work is to illustrate how broad the term Crowdsourcing is and what opportunities it offers for businesses by providing an overview of the common forms. a further purpose is to depict where, in what form and how those activities take place. The cornerstones for a successful outcome are already set at the beginning of a project, whereby this paper describes single decisions to make along a Crowdsourcing process and their influence on the project's course, in order to understand how and why each decision during the process can be determining. thus marking a third purpose. The focus of this third purpose is on Crowd Innovation leading to the primarily purpose, namely to identify and name essential factors for the success of a crowd product innovation project in Web 2.0. These factors will demonstrate which steps and rules have to be followed by a company to implement prosperous Crowdsourcing activities in this field.