Elsevier

Business Horizons

Volume 60, Issue 2, March–April 2017, Pages 167-177
Business Horizons

Taming wicked civic challenges with an innovative crowd

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2016.11.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Civic challenges such as urban mobility and energy problems offer new corporate innovation opportunities. However, such challenges are wicked and difficult to tame. They require novel solutions that account for and integrate contradictory perspectives within the local innovation ecosystem of firms, governments, and citizens. This article presents a successful civic innovation crowdsourcing project case study, in which multinational firm Bombardier encouraged a global civic crowd to co-create visionary solutions to the challenge of future mobility in crowded cities around the world. Bombardier recruited a global crowd of 900 individuals and facilitated the citizen development of more than 215 solutions of unique firm value. We explore the process and outcome of this crowdsourcing project and derive actionable design principles for a three-phased civic innovation crowdsourcing process including: (1) crowd construction, (2) crowd knowledge acquisition, and (3) crowd knowledge assimilation. This process enables the crowd to integrate members’ diverse and contradictory knowledge proactively at both the team and individual levels. Additionally, the crowd is able to balance extension of existing local solutions and exploration of path-breaking technologies and solution concepts.

Section snippets

Setting the scene: Corporate innovation opportunities in civic innovation

Today, many firms seek to establish themselves as leaders in civic innovation by developing novel solutions for concerns such as mobility, energy, and food safety (Frost & Sullivan, 2014). To establish leadership in innovation, firms pioneer the exploration of new civic opportunities (Cisco, 2014, IBM, 2014, Maerivoet et al., 2012), hoping to gain a competitive edge as based on their unique insights regarding how to address particular civic challenges (Williamson & De Meyer, 2012).

Developing

Mastering wicked problems: Lessons learned from public planning

Wicked problems are discussed regularly in the context of public policy and urban planning (Farley, 2007); however, we focus on wickedness from the perspective of a corporate firm rather than that of a policy maker or urban planner. In taking such a corporate view, we should reiterate that wickedness does not refer to a problem's degree of difficulty. As pointed out by the originators of the wickedness concept, wickedness points to the set of distinct, elusive features of a problem that

Civic innovation crowdsourcing: A new way to tame wicked problems?

Crowdsourcing describes an online, distributed problem-solving model under which organizations employ “IT to outsource an organizational function to a strategically defined population of human and non-human actors in the form of an open call” (Kietzmann, 2017, p. 152). In this article, we focus on firm-sponsored innovation crowdsourcing efforts wherein firms aim to create corporate innovation opportunities. Civic innovation is a new domain to which such firm-sponsored crowdsourcing can be

The Bombardier YouCity Challenge

As part of its YouCity Challenge, multinational firm Bombardier used a public crowd to create an extra-organizational knowledge pool that provided the firm with new civic innovation opportunities. Bombardier's ultimate goal was to establish itself as a global leader in urban mobility. The YouCity initiative, which took place in 2012 and lasted for 3.5 months, called for visionary submissions to shape the future of urban mobility in cities around the world. Structured as a type of contest,

The process: How Bombardier worked the crowd

In developing its YouCity Challenge, the Bombardier innovation team purposefully designed the phases of crowdsourcing:

  • 1.

    Constructing the crowd;

  • 2.

    Acquiring knowledge; and

  • 3.

    Assimilating knowledge from the crowd.

Next, we will discuss each phase individually with a focus on how the process supported integration and contextualization, which are both essential for wicked problem solving.

The outcome: Integrative and contextualized solutions

So far, we have provided insight into how Bombardier designed the process to create integrative and contextualized solutions. Next, we explore the outcomes of this process. We take a closer look—both in terms of integration and contextualization—at characteristics of the conceptual solutions submitted by the crowd.

Discussion: Actionable design principles for taming civic challenges with the crowd

This article illustrates that innovation crowdsourcing can create unique corporate benefits via insights regarding visionary and locally customized solutions for civic challenges. As civic challenges are wicked in nature, they require the intentional design of a civic innovation crowdsourcing process. In essence, our article clarifies that managers must first purposefully construct their own diverse crowd that reflects the local innovation ecosystem context. Then, they need to take deliberate

Final thoughts

To conclude, we want to point out that civic challenges have become an important playing field for corporate innovation efforts. Wicked civic challenges not only populate the domain of public planning but also offer new opportunities for firms to establish innovation leadership. We encourage managers to harness the power of the crowd in developing innovation opportunities that shape our future.

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