Regina Lenart-Gansiniec

Crowd Capital - Conceptualisation Attempt

Background. The problems of open innovation and crowdsourcing are more and more often present in literature on management sciences. It is emphasized that during creation of innovation a given organisation should make use of the knowledge existing outside of it. Moreover, it is suggested that the process of creating and developing products or services should be open. By the same, organisations should make use of the knowledge that is being possessed by a generally understood public or crowd (Wexler, 2011). The crowd has gained a new meaning: from unorganised, chaotic and often aggressive people it has become organised and oriented towards problem solving, and in particular creating the so-called open innovations. However, despite the increase of researchers’ interest in the subject of open innovation or crowdsourcing and awareness of “crowd wisdom”, it is difficult to find in the literature unambiguous answers to the question on what is crowd capital. Many authors assume that crowd capital is the core of both open innovation and crowdsourcing. Research aims. The aim of the article is integration and synthesis of the existing scientific output related to crowd capital and presenting an original conceptualisation of this notion. Methodology. In order to identify the main research perspectives and develop a proposal of the conceptualisation, the method of systematic literature review was used, including an analysis of the number of citations. This enabled revealing the existing research axes and the cognitive structure emerging from works published so far. Publications entered in full text databases were analysed. The research covered a period of 9 years: from 2007 to 2016. Key findings. The review and analysis of the contents of publications listed within the systematic literature review enabled identifying of the directions of further scientific research. The systematic foreign and domestic literature review published until 2016 indicated that many levels and areas of the occurrence of the subject phenomenon have still not been examined, which shows free space for new research in this scope. The article presents a proposal of an original conceptualisation of the notion of crowd capital.

Public Trust and Organizational Learning in Academic Institutions in Poland

It is widely known that the possibility of common learning increases the probability of high collaborative performance. In contemporary knowledge generation, one of the main organizational factors which has a significant impact on collaborative processes is trust. Particularly, it is organizational trust that significantly influences the organizational knowledge-sharing environment. The influence of the multidimensional nature of trust on the learning processes and knowledge exchange depends on the area of an organization’s activity, which in this chapter is assumed to be the search for the relations between organizational trust and studying in higher schools. The achievement of this research goal is based on desk research and a diagnostic survey.

Conceptualisation of “Crowdsourcing” Term in Management Sciences

Background. Crowdsourcing is a relatively new concept, nonetheless it has been raising more and more interest with researchers. This is a result of its potential since it enables improving business processes, creating open innovations, building of competitive advantage, access to experience, information, crowd skills and work, problem solving, crisis management, expanding the organisation’s existing activity and offer, creating the organisation’s image, improving communication with the surroundings, optimising costs of the organisation’s activity. However, although the subject of crowdsourcing constitutes one of the currently emerging directions of research on the basis of management sciences, one observes a peculiar exploration difficulty. It may result from incoherence in conceptualisation or explication of this term. Research aims. The aim of this article is an attempt, basing on the existing research efforts, to conceptualise crowdsourcing based on management sciences. In the article a proposal of conceptualising the notion of crowdsourcing was presented including its levels. Methodology. For the needs of specifying, evaluation, and identification of the existing state of knowledge on crowdsourcing, a systematic literature review was conducted. It enabled getting familiar with the results of similar research, its selection and critical analysis and based on that it was used for expanding the earlier findings of other researchers. The biggest, full text databases i.e Ebsco, Elsevier/Springer, Emerald, Proquest, Scopus, and ISI Web of Science, which include the majority of journals on strategic management were analysed. In order to establish the state of knowledge and existing findings a review of databases in Poland: BazEkon and CEON was also conducted. 54 elaborations of English language databases and 41 from Polish language databases from the period of 2006–2017 were analysed. Key findings. A review of the scientific output revealed incoherence in the conceptualisation of the term of crowdsourcing. The approaches proposed in the existing literature are inadequate and do not allow for full understanding of crowdsourcing.

Uwarunkowania skutecznego dzielenia się wiedzą na uczelni

Purpose of the article is empirical verification of factors of efficient knowledge sharing by scientific workers of universities, existing in literature of the subjects, and an attempt to identify the most significant of them. The illustrative empirical data were obtained through a research tool in a form of a survey questionnaire, addressed to workers employed on scientific and didactic positions at universities located in Poland. The realized research allowed to specify previous knowledge related to premises of knowledge sharing, with regard to the knowledge workers. Results of the performed research suggest that these factors are mainly of a resourceful nature. The obtained results not only confirm but also complement the theoretical basis for knowledge sharing in the academic environment.