Creating and Capturing Value Through Crowdsourcing

Christopher L. Tucci is Professor of Management of Technology at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, where he holds the Chair in Corporate Strategy & Innovation. He received the Ph.D. in Management from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before going back for his PhD, his prior work experience was as an industrial computer scientist at Ford Aerospace, where he was involved in developing Internet protocols in the 1980s. Tucci's primary area of interest is in technological change and how waves of technological changes influence entrant / incumbent dynamics. He is the co-author of the books Nurturing Science-Based Ventures and Internet Business Models and Strategies, and has published articles in, among others, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Research Policy, and Communications of the ACM.


Allan Afuah is Professor of Corporate Strategy and International Business at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He received his PhD from MIT. His honors include the 1999 MBA Teacher of the Year at Michigan. His 2012 article 'Crowdsourcing as solution to distant search' (co-authored with Christopher Tucci) won the 2013 AMR Best Paper Award. His books, Innovation Management: Strategies, Implementation, and Profits, (Oxford University Press) and Internet Business Models (co-authored with Christopher Tucci, McGrawHill) have been translated into several languages. His research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Management, Research Policy, Industrial and Corporate Change, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and Sloan Management Review.


Gianluigi Viscusi (PhD) is research fellow at the Chair of Corporate Strategy and Innovation (CSI) of the EPFL. His areas of expertise include information systems strategy and planning, business modeling, public policy and ICT-enabled Innovation, e-Government, information quality and value, service management and engineering, social study of information systems. He has been consultant on e-government planning, policy design, and implementation roadmaps for international organizations such as, e.g., the OECD. His research has been published in a range of books, conference proceedings, and journals such as, Government Information Quarterly. In 2010 he has co-authored with Carlo Batini and Massimo Mecella Information Systems for eGovernment: A quality of service perspective (Springer, Heidelberg).

Examples of the value that can be created and captured through crowdsourcing go back to at least 1714 when the UK used crowdsourcing to solve the Longitude Problem, obtaining a solution that would enable the UK to become the dominant maritime force of its time. Today, Wikipedia uses crowds to provide entries for the world's largest and free encyclopedia. Partly fueled by the value that can be created and captured through crowdsourcing, interest in researching the phenomenon has been remarkable.

Despite this - or perhaps because of it - research into crowdsourcing has been conducted in different research silos, within the fields of management (from strategy to finance to operations to information systems), biology, communications, computer science, economics, political science, among others. In these silos, crowdsourcing takes names such as broadcast search, innovation tournaments, crowdfunding, community innovation, distributed innovation, collective intelligence, open source, crowdpower, and even open innovation. This book aims to assemble chapters from many of these silos, since the ultimate potential of crowdsourcing research is likely to be attained only by bridging them. Chapters provide a systematic overview of the research on crowdsourcing from different fields based on a more encompassing definition of the concept, its difference for innovation, and its value for both private and public sector.

The book is made up of a unique collection of contributions of leading scholars from different research areas to provide a systematic overview of the research on crowdsourcing, based on a clear definition of the concept, its difference for innovation, and its value for both private and public sector.