Digital Skill Evolution in an Industrial Relationship

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a powerful mechanism for doing online work and allows for collaboration. By now, in the media and in business on the Internet, crowdsourcing is recognized as an innovative form of value creation that needs taken seriously. This article provides a framework to propose the relation between crowds and tutorship; it considers the tutor of a crowd as a strategic professional figure in an online community. This is done by the consideration of the different roles, activities and tasks of a tutor through the field analysis of a platform of one company that uses crowdsourcing. This tutor is examined based on the middle-of-the-road theoretical positioned from Porter and Kramer, the value creation, and Suermann and Franzoni, the crows science user contribution patterns. The recently evolution of crowd platforms considers the interaction between companies and crowds based on a “Community of Practice” model of Zucchermaglio and Talamo. Value analysis also considers the differences in roles and tasks in relation to where crowd activity is placed into the value chain of company. In crowdsourcing, “digital people” live in a digital society where every individual has a role and operates in an online community, and those have force points and weakness points. The tutor cans also monitor these points, and push interaction and activities of the crowd. The main theoretical contribution is the looking gap in literature and contributing work to this. Through a qualitative analysis, this article provides evidence of the main activities and the role of digital tutors in an online community. The method utilized is netnography through an online participation and observation of a researcher. In this work, professional figures and new technologies are weighed, and human resource management must consider this as it creates value. This article concludes that a tutor of crowds has a positive behavior, they can stimulate crowds. These positive and active behaviors effect crowd attitudes about the benefits of the community, their expectations, and opinions all of which are fundamental for the growth of online community.