Tap Into Product Cocreation Model-Crowd, Idea, Product Development, and Market Performance In Crowdsourcing

In the era of social network, online community, and user generated contents (UGC) portals, companies have open up the innovation process and design products by incorporating the creativity of an open crowd, a mixture of consumer, designer, engineer, scientist, marketer, researcher, etc. The product co-creation (PCCR) model, explored in this study, features an emerging business segment with incumbents utilizing online platform to co-develop products with the crowd, and demonstrates the enormous potential of new business process of crowdsourcing in new product development (NPD). Different from the in-house NPD, this open innovation treats the crowd as the reservoir for creativity, wisdom and human resource. This proposed research substantially contributes to the under developed literature in this emerging domain.We begin with an outline of the theoretical framework of PCCR model, focusing on two important outcomes: the initial product idea and the final product. We tap into different dimensions of quality by distinguishing among idea novelty, consumer value and feasibility. We investigate the effect of these quality attributes on initial ideas’ survival through screening and development stages. Next, we link the ideation with final product by hypothesizing the influence of idea quality on the output performance of final product. Moreover, we explore value cocreation by examining the role of crowd’s expertise in product development stage. Specifically, we inspect how crowd’s input with technical (generic) solution expertise in technical (non-technical) development phases contributes to the improvement of product quality and sales performance. Finally, we propose a study to identify the most value-adding ideators and product developers, and postulate that these two subsets of crowd might not be highly overlapping.To operationalize our research framework, we pick a real-word example of PCCR model: Quiky.com, which made its exposure in latest academic research. We delineate the empirical data that we are collecting, and suggest a data augmentation through consumer coding on an open human resource crowdsourcing platform, a latest development in online business research to exploit intellectual resources from the open crowd.From a managerial perspective, this research promotes crowdsourcing as an effective NPR process and provides guidance for critical PCCR decisions such as idea screening and product selection in achieving best product marketing performance. The extracted stage-specific information helps better illustrate the value cocreation through PCCR. Study on crowd individuals offers implications on how to identify and exploit the potential of the most productive and profitable subgroup of crowd.