Riccardo Maiolini

Crowdsourcing and SMEs: Opportunities and Challenges

Crowdsourcing is a relatively new topic and it presents a number of potential applications, open to future developments. The number of SMEs using crowdsourcing is still low, however some recent examples include fund-raising, new products development and customer service management. But what are the potential benefits of crowdsourcing for SMEs? What are the challenges? The aim of this paper is to present some initial answers to these research questions: first by delineating and analyzing the characteristics, the strengths and the risks of crowdsourcing; second by developing preliminary reflections on the adoption of crowdsourcing by SMEs. The main limitation of the paper is that the research is at an initial status. The present contribution is therefore an exploratory work. Due also to space constraints, a second limitation lies in the lack of empirical data. However, the authors intend to further develop the preliminary reflections here proposed to form the basis an actual model of crowdsourcing adoption in SMEs.

A Design Theory for Dynamic Competencies Mapping Systems

This paper describes a research in progress that addresses the design problem of dynamically mapping competencies with IT. In turbulent markets, companies face the problem of an expansive maintenance of competencies inventory. They have to choose between maintaining those systems and manage new knowledge or abandoning them and risk being less competitive. Using IS design theory [1], we’ll try to identify meta requirement, products and process requirements and testable hypothesis in order to develop an IT tool able to classify old and new competencies in a dynamic way. The hypothesis will be tested comparing a real competence inventory (elaborated by ISFOL, an Italian public entity) with an inventory coming from an IT tool designed with this methodology. These activities are planned in three phases. As first step, we extract from ISFOL database a list of competencies required for financial organizational roles. The second step is to hypothesize which sources could provide these competencies in order to verify extracting competencies from the “corpus” articulated in those sources. The third steps of this process will be to compare ISFOL skills inventory for financial industry and the inventory that comes from a DCMS (Dynamic Competencies Mapping System).

Reducing Inertia and Forwarding Changes: Crowdsourcing to Reduce Uncertainty. A Theoretical Model

Crowdsourcing is evolving as an instrument but also as a way to think and organize new companies. For this reason is interesting understand the new phenomenon within classical organizational theories and in particular, in this paper, the population ecology theory. In a evolutionary approach We suggest a theoretical model that can be useful to understand how companies arise with a web-based approach, considering crowdsourcing as a relevant element that characterizes their 2.0 new approaches, starting from the fact that companies that born with 2.0’s characteristics have better chance to survive to radical changes than others.

Unfolding Collective Social Entrepreneurship

In this paper we investigate the creation and development of a case of collective social entrepreneurship. More specifically we provide a longitudinal exploration of the preconditions and mechanism...

How Teams Can Achieve Success Using New Technologies in Order to Help Knowledge Sharing and Organizational Learning in Communities of Practice: A Case Study in Public Sector

The aim of this paper is to explain how new technologies can contribute to overcome problems in developing of knowledge sharing in self-regulated team within a socio-technical approach. Especially knowledge sharing among Community of Practice’s members can be helped adopting some simple web-based solution. This knowledge sharing, that in the past was possible only “off-line”, allows to teams the spanning of temporal and special boundaries. After a review of socio-technical assumptions, we draw a model where the adoption of simple web-based technology have a mediation effect on both individual and team performances. The propositions based on this model have been tested in a recent case study. Findings confirm that adopting web-based solutions, the knowledge sharing among Communities of Practice member across the company and about solution to variances have a stronger effect on team performance.

How Does the Management of Multiple Stakeholders’ Interests Influence Decision-Making Processes? Exploring the Case of Crowdsourced Placemaking

Considering the difficulties that concern the stakeholder engagement, there is a strong debate on the opportunities that web 2.0 and crowdsourcing platforms can arise to resolve decision-making and facilitate alternative choices. The paper is based on the analysis of two companies that use a platform of crowdsourced placemaking trying to engage multiple stakeholders to construct and discuss about the most relevant solutions. This is an explorative paper that tries to understand the new phenomenon.