The Crowdsourcing Process: an Intermediary Mediated Idea Generation Approach in the Early Phase of Innovation

Intermediary mediated crowdsourcing ({CS)} has become a widely adopted open innovation approach for idea generation in various companies of different industries. Despite many success stories and a large body of literature in the fields of idea generation, online competition and open innovation, little is known about the intermediary mediated {CS} process in the early stage of the innovation process. An explorative, qualitative and quantitative multi-case study research design was applied to extract the longitudinal data that were analysed in this research. Based on 12 {CS} projects executed by nine Swiss companies from four industries on the Swiss intermediary {CS} platform atizo.com, five important phases of the intermediary mediated {CS} process were identified and described. Additionally, important tasks within each phase which ought to be considered by companies when engaging in an intermediary mediated {CS} project for idea generation were elaborated.