Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

The advent of the Internet into mass global use has empowered individuals in their roles as citizens, consumers, or just being themselves more fully. People ́s access to information exceeds the capabilities of the heads of state or industry captains of just a few decades ago. The ability to be social, albeit virtually, or to influence others via social media, exceed anything possible then. The transactional affordances within the broad realm of ecommerce have grown exponentially and are growing apace. Moreover, all these capabilities are becoming fully integrated on platforms commonly available throughout the world. The new habitus, norms, laws, and regulations are in statu nascendi. Our research explores the multisided outcomes and consequences of this transformation. One of the consequent phenomena is co-creation, defined as “the participation of consumers along with producers in the creation of value in the marketplace” ([3], p. 13). Access to open-source resources further enhances the ability of individuals to act as creators, designers, makers, citizen scientists, or ideators. To use just one very recent example, AlphaFold, a neural-network based system for predicting protein structure and thus its function, has been placed last month in the public domain by DeepMind (a Google company) [1]. This can enable qualified individuals to contribute to corporate efforts at a high intellectual level. Corporate access to such individuals vastly benefits the organizations that enable themselves to take advantage of it. The two principal categories of co-creation identified in [3] are the autonomous co-creation by individuals and communities, where the initiative and the agency rests with them, and company-sponsored co-creation, where the persons act at the behest of producers. When done properly, sponsored co-creation can vastly expand a firm’s organizational knowledge, contribute to its organizational learning, and enhance the flexibility of its human resource management. Among the great variety of broadly understood cocreation activities, company-sponsored online co-creation brainstorming (COCB) conducted on a firm’s site, is a frequent format of harnessing collective intelligence of outsiders on behalf of the corporate activities [2]. A range of motivators can serve to enhance the quantity and quality of contributions. Distinction is drawn between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, an important difference, although fuzzy at times (think of an individual’s learning by doing or acquiring a reputation by contributing). There exists a body of scholarship asserting the crowding out of the intrinsic motivation to co-create when extrinsic motivators, such as remunerations, are enacted by the sponsoring company. In the opening paper of the issue, Siddharth Baswani, Anthony M. Townsend, and Andy Luse study the impact of financial incentives on the participation intention in COCB, in a format of ongoing crowdsourcing sites sponsored by a company. The