Online Crowdsourcing Campaigns: Bottom-Up versus Top-Down Process Model

When a crowd’s motivations are not triggered, they may not necessarily commit their best efforts, even if they have the knowledge to answer an open call. Drawing on the incentive theory, we introduce a top-down process model for an online crowdsourcing campaign that addresses the crowd’s motivations. This model is in contrast to the traditional bottom-up process model, where the crowd self-selects an open call based on their knowledge. We adopt a longitudinal case study method and examine two online crowdsourcing campaigns that represent both models. The findings suggest that the campaign that follows the top-down model generated high-quality ideas, while the bottom-up case was considered a failure. We further enrich the top-down model by developing a four-stage guidance model that addresses the crowd’s differing motivations in each stage. This research contributes to the crowdsourcing literature and helps better attract the qualifying crowd, thereby leading to greater campaign success likelihood.