From Collaborative Community to Competitive Market: The Quest to Build a Crowdsourcing Platform for Social Innovation

Abstract

Crowdsourcing presents new opportunities to generate social innovation. However, many crowdsourcing social innovation initiatives struggle with turning their promising projects into sustaining platforms. We studied how to design crowdsourcing platforms for social innovation by building and examining a platform called travel2change. We illustrate a framework of crowdsourcing platform building blocks based on the evolution of our case study from a collaborative community to a competitive market. Thriving platforms have a clear purpose, they facilitate value‐creating interactions for well‐understood actors and build a valid business model. The insights reveal design principles to guide organizations that seek to leverage crowdsourcing for social impact.