Taming wicked civic challenges with an innovative crowd

Sabine Brunswicker, Volker Bilgram and Johann Fueller

Business Horizons, 2017, vol. 60, issue 2, 167-177

Abstract: Civic challenges such as urban mobility and energy problems offer new corporate innovation opportunities. However, such challenges are wicked and difficult to tame. They require novel solutions that account for and integrate contradictory perspectives within the local innovation ecosystem of firms, governments, and citizens. This article presents a successful civic innovation crowdsourcing project case study, in which multinational firm Bombardier encouraged a global civic crowd to co-create visionary solutions to the challenge of future mobility in crowded cities around the world. Bombardier recruited a global crowd of 900 individuals and facilitated the citizen development of more than 215 solutions of unique firm value. We explore the process and outcome of this crowdsourcing project and derive actionable design principles for a three-phased civic innovation crowdsourcing process including: (1) crowd construction, (2) crowd knowledge acquisition, and (3) crowd knowledge assimilation. This process enables the crowd to integrate members’ diverse and contradictory knowledge proactively at both the team and individual levels. Additionally, the crowd is able to balance extension of existing local solutions and exploration of path-breaking technologies and solution concepts.

Keywords: Crowdsource; Wicked problems; Civic innovation; Crowdsourcing innovation; Innovation facilitation; Bombardier Inc. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681316301239
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bushor:v:60:y:2017:i:2:p:167-177

DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2016.11.001

Access Statistics for this article

Business Horizons is currently edited by C. M. Dalton

More articles in Business Horizons from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().