Investigating Business Sustainability of Crowdsourcing Platforms

Nowadays, crowdsourcing has become a popular way of sourcing. As intermediaries that connect crowdsourcers and crowds, crowdsourcing platforms integrate state-of-the-art information technologies and specialized organizational functions to host and govern crowdsourcing projects. The extant literature on crowdsourcing has investigated numerous aspects of crowdsourcing platforms. However, a majority of studies are project-oriented and short-term focused. There is a lack of a holistic view of crowdsourcing platforms as enterprises with a developmental perspective. This study aims to address this issue by investigating business sustainability of crowdsourcing platforms. By considering temporal dimensions and multiple interpretations of business sustainability, a conceptual framework is proposed to investigate the sustainability of a crowdsourcing platform by analyzing the key business process, value co-creation, and business development, which is a major theoretical contribution of the study. A case study of LEGO Ideas is presented to illustrate the practical implementation of the proposed framework. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.