Towards a maturity model for the assessment of ideation in crowdsourcing projects

Social media technology has enabled virtual collaborative environments such that people can actively interact, share knowledge, coordinate activities, solve problems and co-create value. Organizations have begun to leverage approaches and technologies to involve numerous people from outside their boundaries to perform organizational tasks. Crowd sourcing is a collaboration model enabled by people-centric web technologies to solve individual, organizational, and societal problems using a dynamically formed crowd of people who respond to an open call for participation. Despite the success and popularity of this phenomenon, there appears to be a lack of guidance on how to organize the ideation processes in crowd sourcing. To address this need, we propose a Crowd sourcing Ideation Maturity Assessment Model (CIMAM). The CIMAM is intended to be sufficiently generic to be applied to different types of crowd sourcing initiatives/projects. It can be used by external assessors or by crowd sourcing organizers themselves for self-assessments. CIMAM was developed through a literature review and built on the constructs of Pedersen et al. [22] model. This paper contributes to research by examining the various factors influencing crowd engagement and productivity.