From Knowledge Capture to Knowledge Integration, the Key Role of Integrative Actions in Crowdsourcing for Innovation

Crowdsourcing (CS) for innovation is the outsourcing of problem solving or creative tasks to the crowd via the Internet. To benefit from CS, the literature points out the key role of absorptive capacity (ACAP). From the ACAP perspective, integrative actions foster the integration and facilitate the exploitation of new external knowledge. However, the CS literature has been paying increasing attention to open actions supported by the crowd. Little is known about the compensatory integrative actions needed to contain the diversity of knowledge from the crowd. This exploratory research begins to fill this gap by considering five cases of CS for innovation. We show that when firms implement CS for innovation, they succeed in developing potential absorptive capacities (acquisition and assimilation of the crowd’s knowledge), yet experience significant challenges in developing realized absorptive capacities (transformation and exploitation of the crowd’s knowledge), due to the weakness of integrative actions. CS appears to be a relevant mechanism to capture external knowledge, but should be reinforced with more specific integrative actions to exploit and create value from this knowledge.