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Getting Inside Your Employees' Heads: Navigating Barriers to Internal-Crowdsourcing for Product and Service Innovation

Organizations are beginning to experiment with the use of the “crowd” to complete tasks commonly performed by employees or designated agents. While “crowdsourcing” is growing, we know little about common uses of the crowd and the challenges such initiatives present. Findings from a grounded theory study reveal four common uses by established organizations: productivity, product/service innovation, knowledge capture, and marketing/branding. Further, leveraging internal crowds for product/service innovation may present unique challenges. Based on findings, an Internal-Crowdsourcing Acceptance Model illustrates the role of proactive executive leadership in breaking through organizational structure and processes that act as barriers to acceptance and use of internal-crowdsourcing platforms. The anticipated theoretical contribution of this research is the finding that internal-crowdsourcing presents many of the same challenges to organizations as faced in open innovation initiatives. Its anticipated contribution to practice is the identification of the role proactive executive leadership plays in reducing barriers to successful outcomes.