EXPLORING THE BRIEF NARRATIVE IN CROWDSOURCING CONTESTS AS ENABLER OF DISTRIBUTED DESIGN

There is an increasing interest in online crowdsourcing contest as a channel of innovation for companies, which implies new managerial challenges. However, research to date has still a limited knowledge on how the relationship between the organization idea seeker and the solvers occurs, specifically little is known on how the task outsourced is framed. The present study explores design contests and focuses on how the task is formulated as mechanism to effectively engage the community of designers. We empirically investigated in depth the narrative of contests launched by an Italian design crowdsourcing platform. We show that task is framed by four dimensions: technology, users experience, corporate identity, creativity, we describe the narrative used to communicate them and we identify three patterns of combination of the four dimensions. Our findings provide exploratory evidence on how a problem is framed in a crowdsourcing contest in order to effectively stimulate the solvers to invest their efforts and resources to generate ideas that are both creative and aligned with a firm’s requirements.