크라우드소싱 커뮤니티 내 고객 선호와 조직 수용 아이디어 간 비교 연구

Abstract

Traditionally, organizations have innovated themselves with their internal resources. However, due to the rapid development of technology and the frequent changes in the business environment, organizations have begun to open their innovation process advocating the importance of the customer role. One of the approaches is crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing, a composite word of “crowd” and “outsourcing” is coined by Jeff Howe in 2006. This new concept is based on the belief that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions than expert individuals. As a result, many organizations across diverse industries are now crowdsourcing their ideation efforts in an attempt to get new ideas into their innovation process. In light of this, crowdsourcing is drawing attention from academic researchers as well as practitioners. Considering that the goal of idea crowdsourcing is harnessing innovative ideas, understanding the characteristics of user-favorable and organization-adoptable ideas can enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the crowdsourcing. However, existing studies mainly have been conducted in conceptual level. Therefore, in our approach, we question what are the factors that affect user preference and organization adoption. Referring to the related studies in Web 2.0 area including social media and online review, we extracted idea content based characteristics such as idea subjectivity, idea negativity, idea pro-socialness, and depth of idea. In this paper, we define that idea subjectivity and idea negativity mean the extent to which the idea is presented in a subjective and negative manner respectively. Idea pro-socialness means whether or not the idea asks the organization to do good for the society. Depth of idea represents the extent to which the idea is described in detail. Based on previous studies, we hypothesize that an idea with high subjectivity, negativity, pro-socialness and depth has a positive effect on its being user favorable and organization adoptable. We empirically validate the effects of the characteristics of user ideas on organization-adoption and user-favorableness using the dataset from MSI (MyStarbucksIdea.com). We collected 71,134 ideas posted on MSI, which was launched by Starbucks in 2008 and is currently one of the most successful idea crowdsourcing communities. Our analysis of the user ideas in MSI shows that there exist significant differences between user-favorable and organization-adoptable ideas in terms of idea characteristics. That is, ideas high in subjectivity and low in negativity tend to be favored by the users, while ideas low in negativity and depth, and high in pro-socialness are likely to be adoptable to the organization. Theoretically, we deepen our understanding about opinion acceptance behaviors in a crowdsourcing community, which contrast with the results of prior studies. Managerially, our findings are expected to contribute to mitigate the challenges in crowdsourcing community such as information overload problem caused by too much idea to be processed.