Chapter 9: Cheap Solutions: Managing a Coproducing Crowd of Strangers to Solve Your Problems

The growing phenomenon of Crowdsourcing has introduced new opportunities and challenges for managers. The opportunities include inviting a worldwide group of talented and educated people to contribute to coproducing solutions for organizational problems. The challenges include redesigning the organization structure, incentive system, and information platform to allow a crowd of stranger’s access to the organization and its intellectual property. This chapter focuses on the facilitating factors that enable crowdsourcing, the contingency factors that shape how crowdsourcing is implemented and the outcomes that ensue. The key factors that can enable managers to effectively assess how they can use a crowd of strangers to coproduce solutions to their problems are presented and discussed.