Motivating Crowds to Do Good: How to Build Crowdsourcing Platforms for Social Innovation

Thomas Kohler and Henry Chesbrough 

Social innovations, just as any other form of innovation, can benefit from crowd engagement. However, the enthusiasm for crowdsourcing social innovation has so far run ahead of its effects. Many platforms are stillborn and struggle with turning their promising projects into sustaining platforms. As opposed to commercial crowd innovations projects, additional obstacles need to be handled here. Social innovation tends to be more complex and typically involves an entire ecosystem with complementary partners. In addition, funding is usually more difficult as the impact of doing good on a communal level is hard to assess and therefore difficult to explain to investors or sponsors. To make social innovation successful, the innovation platform design needs to tackle these additional challenges. The governance and coordination of social innovation projects need to be designed thoughtfully. Organizations need to be prepared for several loops and some experimentation to balance value generation with the right structure and the right mix of participants, consumers and other platform partners.