A Configurational Approach to Attracting Participation in Crowdsourcing Social Innovation: The Case of Openideo

Abstract

Crowdsourcing social innovation refers to utilization of crowdsourcing to solve social issues. It faces two organizational communication challenges to attract contributions: the public’s short attention span and concerns about a project’s feasibility. Guided by configurational thinking, we combine agenda setting theory and signaling theory to explore how combinations of four factors—media coverage, project duration, number of partners, and cross-sectoral partnership—can complement or substitute for one another to explain high and low crowd contributions solicited. With 53 cases from Openideo.com, we employ a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify two pathways to high contributions and two pathways resulting in low contributions. Implications on how organizations may design their crowdsourcing projects to attract more contributions are provided.