Organizations strive to tap into the potential of crowdsourcing by asking people around the world to come up with ideas. But what makes crowdsourcing work? We conducted a large-scale research project to understand why some organizations succeed to attract crowds and others fail.
Efforts to leverage the knowledge of external contributors have been used for centuries. For instance, the British Parliament used crowdsourcing to find the solution to the longitude problem that was one of the most pressing scientific problems of the 18th century. Similarly, Napoleon struggled to supply nutritious food for his troops who fighting wars far from home and turned to crowdsourcing to find a solution.
