Money, pastime, task autonomy, social contact, ... Have you ever wondered why people spend time on paid crowdsourcing markets such as Amazon Mechanical Turk? This was the research question of the study which Nicolas Kaufmann, Thimo Schulze and Daniel Veit executed in 2011.

The term crowdsourcing was defined by Howe in 2006 as “the outsourcing of a function or task traditionally done by a designated agent to an undefined network of labourers carried out by a company or a similar institution using a type of “open call”.” Nowadays they use this term to refer to phenomena such as open innovation, co-creation and knowledge aggregation.

The study executed by the authors of this paper focused on the paid crowdsourcing market Amazon Mechanical Turk. They wanted to determine the motivation of the people who are active on this crowdsourcing platform. Therefore they built a special model that combines different existing motivation models like work motivation and education theory and the Self-Determination Theory.  They called this model: “the Worker’s Motivation in Crowdsourcing model”.

The authors posted a task on Mechanical Turk to collect their data. The task called “Scientific survey about Mechanical Turk usage”. The task took 10 to 15 minutes and they paid the respondents $0.30.  The results of the survey showed that a lot of people are motivated by the payment, this is surprising because the overall wage level on the platform is only $1.38/h. Furthermore the pastime motivation is only important for occasional workers. The power workers (the people who spend the most time on the platform) have more intrinsic motivation such as skill variety and task autonomy.  

27-02-2012 om 19:49 geschreven door Camille  

Mahr, D. & Schuurman, D. 2011. Innovation with Living Labs: a Conceptualization of Learning from User Experiences. European Marketing Academy, 40th, Proceedings, 6

The lack of correspondence between customer needs and product characteristics represents a key reason for failed innovations. This study researches customer involvement in innovation processes by the use of Living Labs. It focuses on two main research questions:

(1) What defines a Living Lab and how does it foster knowledge creation?

(2) What is the impact of customer characteristics on knowledge created through Living Labs?

The concept of Living Labs is a process where firms observe customers in their own real-life setting when they develop solutions to new unprecedented problems and discover new usage possibilities. The firms learn from those use experiences, generalize the findings and modify products for new trials.

The advantages and disadvantages as well as the characteristics which distinguish Living Labs from other research approaches are explained in the paper.

Also the type of involved customers determines the success. Lead users dispose of useful knowledge for the innovation process. They detect needs far before other customers and they benefit by obtaining a solution to them. Often the role of so-called ‘defectors’ – unsatisfied users -  is underestimated.

The authors conclude with proposals of future research opportunities like research on the design and use of Living Labs or finding out the importance of the role of Living Labs in the requirement of customers’ latent needs. In my opinion the authors ignore the negative aspect of attracting voluntary participation.  

Sarah Inghelbrecht

Bijlagen:
http://https://biblio.ugent.be/record/1887143   

24-02-2012 om 17:10 geschreven door Camille