Abstract:
Over the past two decades, a combination of changes in technological, political, and cultural arenas have affected the way in which companies, organizations, groups and individuals innovate. Firms seek for different, more “open” and new ways of thinking about innovation, mostly to complements traditional innovation logics. This dissertation, based on three distinct and jet interconnected papers, explores innovation as a complex challenge for profit and nonprofit organizations, and focuses critically on two promising and widely adopted models for problem solving to manage such innovation process: Crowdsourcing and Design Thinking. This work intends to provide theoretical contributions and empirical evidences on what are the role(s) and the mechanisms of Crowdsourcing and Design Thinking when facing open innovation challenges in organizations. Investigating and comparing these two models allow to better understand the dynamics and the mechanisms underlying their results. The first article investigates crowdsourcing contests. Drawing on matching theory, it suggests that a contest is a two-sided matching process between firms and the crowd, where the way a task is formulated is essential to engage the best idea providers. The second empirical work of this thesis investigate crowdsourcing too, but in nonprofit context. It addresses the issue of how to use crowdsourcing to lead social innovation. By analyzing a crowdsourced co-created platform, this research provides empirical evidences about how a crowd could evolve into a community which will be able to engage in social innovation. The third article focus on Design Thinking. It investigates the process towards solutions in Design Thinking to better understand the challenges and the costs on the use of this model, in particular when newly adopted. It analyzes and isolates the elements, in particular struggles and triggers, which accompany participants, as they work through conflicting demands facing the innovation process.
