Crowd-Innovation: Crowdsourcing Platforms for Innovation

Companies fostering innovation take advantage of an emergent combination of various factors such as the human brains, tools, networks, and technologies. Crowdsourcing platforms support all these elements together and offer quite an interesting tool for all the innovation phases, from idea creation to the market. Despite increasing utilization of these platforms, a systematic analysis of the supported type of services and contributions is missing. This work aims to analyze some of the most used crowdsourcing platforms and to classify them according to the type of contribution they may provide in the innovation process. Using an emerging approach analysis, the following contribution phases have been revealed: idea contests, ongoing idea platforms, platforms for idea screening, innovation platforms, R&D platforms, design contest platforms, ongoing design platforms, creative contests, and platforms for virtual concept testing. In this paper, these nine categories are described in depth t o explain how they serve various phases of the innovation process: idea generation and testing; research and development of rough concepts, detailed concept and testing, production, and market launch.