Enterprise Crowdsourcing and Organizational Culture: Lessons From an Engineering Consultancy

Abstract

Although enterprise crowdsourcing systems that aim to harness the collective intelligence of employees for innovation purposes are proliferating, little is known about how they may impact organisations and their culture. To shed light on this problem, this paper conducts a case study to investigate an engineering consultancy’s efforts to implement an internal crowdsourcing as part of an effort to change the innovation culture of the organisation. Taking the starting point in the literature on the relationship between IT and organisational culture and enterprise crowdsourcing, this paper underscores the interplay between innovation culture and information technology. Our study finds that enterprise crowdsourcing systems can contribute to small changes of the innovation culture of an organisation along several cultural determinants, including behaviours that encourage innovation, communication and knowledge sharing, employees’ relationships, support mechanisms and strategy.