A presentation that I did at the Open & User Innovation Conference, at Harvard Business School, with two fellow crowdsourcing researchers from Canada (Prashant Shukla & John Prpic). Our talk, titled "Is the World Flat? Unpacking the Geography of Crowd Capital," presented early results of a research about crowdsourcing participation across the globe.

1. Is the World Flat?
Unpacking the Geography of
Crowd Capital
John Prpić
(Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University)
Prashant Shukla
(Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University)
(Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto)
Yannig Roth
(Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne)
Jean-Francois Lemoine
(Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne)
(ESSCA Ecole de Management)

2. Agenda
 Research Questions
 Theoretical Grounding
 Empirical Context & Methods
 Results
 Implications for Research & Practice

3. Research Questions
The Geography of the Crowd on Crowdsourcing Outcomes…
 In what manner does the geographic location of individual Crowd
members effect Crowdsourcing participation and outcomes for
organizations?
Contest-Design Variations on Crowdsourcing Outcomes…
 In what manner do variations in Crowdsourcing contest design effect
Crowdsourcing participation and outcomes for organizations?

4. Theoretical Grounding
The Theory of Crowd Capital
 Prpić & Shukla (2013; 2014)
 Prpić, Shukla, Kietzmann & McCarthy (2015)
 TCC is the only theoretical framework that we are aware of that generalizes the
dynamics of numerous substantive areas including:
 Crowdsourcing
 Prediction Markets
 Wikis
 Citizen Science
 Open Innovation Platforms

5. Theoretical Grounding
Dispersed Knowledge (Hayek 1945)
 Every individual has “private knowledge” that is useful, but cannot be accessed.
Crowd Capability
 The IT structure, form of content, and internal processes through which an organization
engages a Crowd.
Crowd Capital
 A heterogeneous organizational resource generated from IT-mediated Crowds.
Dispersed
Knowledge
Crowd
Capability
Crowd Capital

6. Theoretical Grounding
IT Structure
 Crowd-engaging IT is found in Episodic or Collaborative forms, distinguished by whether the
individuals in a Crowd interact with one another or not through the IT.

7. Empirical Context & Methods
eYeka - A global creative
Crowdsourcing intermediary
 280,000 Crowd members from more
160 countries
 We focus on 94 contests in 2012,
involving 28,000+ creators and
1,858,202 observations
 Contest types include video,
documents, photos etc.
 Contest-design varies along challenge
duration, number of prizes awarded,
branded and non-branded.

8. Empirical Context & Methods
Crowd: Geographic
Partitioning
Content: Video/Non-
Video
Process: Submission
Screening
Crowd Capital Created:
Winners

9. Empirical Context & Methods
Multiple Probit Regressions

10. Results
 Non-European Crowd members are significantly less likely to
participate, compared to European Crowd members.
 Only Crowd participants in Latin America are significantly less likely
to succeed in creative Crowdsourcing than European crowd
members.
 The more distinct rewards a contest has, the more participants this
contest attracts.
 Total prize money promised in contests does not significantly affect
participation.

11. Results
 Video contests attract more Crowd participation than non-video
contests.
 Branded contests attract fewer people than unbranded contests.
 Lower likelihood of crowd members from Latin America to
participate in contests with higher total prize money.
 African participants are more likely than others to win branded
contests.

12. Results
 Crowd members from Spain were less likely to participate in contests
with high prize money.
 Crowd members from the United Kingdom were more likely to
participate in contests with high total prize money.
 Crowd members from China and Russia are more likely to succeed in
contests with a high number of prizes.
 Longer contest durations attracts Crowd members from North
America.

13. Implications - Research
 Crowd Capital Theory is useful in guiding empirical inquiry for
Crowdsourcing .
 First validation of Crowd Capital theory as a unifying framework to
study a variety of crowd- engaging phenomenon.
 Do contests at Crowdsourcing intermediaries with collaborative IT
structures (for example where teams can form) engender similar
results?
 Is the Crowd, actually many Crowds?

14. Implications - Practice
 Participation and success in Crowdsourcing contests is not equally
distributed across the globe, and the distribution of participants
does not reflect the distribution of winners.
 Contest design can have different and even opposing effects on
Crowd participation and Crowd Capital creation across continents
and countries.
 Are multiple and customized contest designs the future?
 How might intermediaries target or incentivize specific Crowd
member segments?

15. Thank You!
Twitter:
 @JPnuggets
 @Prashshukla
 @Yannigroth
Blogs:
 thecrowdsociety.jux.com
 phdinstrategicmanagement.wordpress.com
 yannigroth.com