Abstract

As online and voluntary workers, crowd members use and develop own knowledge and creative abilities during execution of open innovation processes on crowdsourcing platforms (CPs). Managers of CPs motivate crowdsourcing workers to effectively develop open innovations as well as new products or services for clients (such as companies, non-profit organizations or people) in accordance with their orders. The purpose of this paper is to present a model of motivating crowd members to participate in open innovation processes on CPs and verify its possible applications on the existing platforms. The model expands the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) framework and adapts the extrinsic, internalized, and intrinsic types of motivation to applications on CPs. Each type of motivation is divided either into an individual or a group subtype of motivation and there are relevant components of crowdsourcing workers' motivation determined for them in the defined two stages of crowdsourcing open innovation processes. The paper analyses the results of Internet's research that was conducted on 66 websites of CPs in 2023 and the social media they make use of. All the motivations determined in the model are used by the CPs under analysis; most of the CPs apply all the components of internalized motivation. The research results confirm that there are possible practical applications for the CPs of the motivations presented in the model.

Keywords: virtual crowdsourcing, crowd members, motivation components, voluntary work, open innovation

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