MA

Innova)on Management

2010 - 12

Crowdsourcing A Pandemonium for Disruptive Innovation

Cristbal Ortiz Ehmann Master of Arts Innovation Management Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London This article is based on the dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement of the degree of Master of Arts in Innovation Management at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London. The original dissertation includes four elements: a hypothesis, a research plan, a critical evaluative report, a feasibility report and the appendix. Only bibliography relevant to this article has been included in the respective section. For any questions or inquiries please contact the author at: xbalpro@gmail.com

Contents
Introduction! What is the degree of innovation that an online community has brought about for an organisation?!
The concept of innovation ! The concept of crowdsourcing! Current results of crowdsourcing initiatives!

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6 8 9

What could be the possible reasons for the results discovered?! 11

Can disruptive innovations be actively brought about? ! Can groups, as opposed to individuals, cause disruptive innovations?! Can online communities produce disruptive innovations?! Is the design of the online crowdsourcing process adequate to realise disruptive innovations? ! Do external factors pertaining to the sponsoring organisations inhibit the development of disruptive innovations?! 11 11 12 12 15

How could these crowdsourcing systems evolve in the future?! Bibliography !

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Introduc)on
Some changes are so radical that they can mean the end of established things or systems. These disruptions seem to emerge and change the whole landscape of the known world. What is remarkable about this phenomenon is the fact that they seem to be unforeseeable and non- inuenceable. Design thinking is a way of transforming things and systems. This approach to solving problems was developed by design practitioners. In the last two decades this practice has been so successful that it is competing shoulder to shoulder with established consulting companies (Hyatt 2010). Its success has been ascribed by the coiners of the term design thinking to a deep human-centredness of the practice and the resulting products and services. This human-centredness has been described not only as the ability to analyse and rationalise but also as the capacity to think intuitively, recognise patterns and to construct ideas that have emotional meaning (Brown & Wyatt 2010). This design thinking, as opposed to traditional consultancies, includes the human factor and all that it means to be human in the value creation loop. Crowdsourcing is one way to place the human factor at the front-end 1 of the value creation loop. It entails leveraging a large number of people to accomplish certain tasks by using information and communication technology. On the one hand, the involvement of a large crowd of people might increase the likelihood that those emotional human traits, harnessed by design thinking and presumably neglected by other practices, are taken into account. On the other hand, according to the philosophical thoughts of Manuel de Landa in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, information-processing technology has allowed a
1

Front end is a generalised term borrowed from computer science that refers to the initial stage of a process. In the context of innovation the front end is the stage at which input is collected in various forms from a source. This input is then funnelled down to a reduced set of options that is then implemented. In general the input is processed and transformed to conform to specications the back end can adopt and use. The front end is an interface between the source and the back end 3

high amount of interactivity. Resulting open networks used for collective decision-making allow the machinic phylum2 to cross between many human beings (de Landa 1991, p. 291). Furthermore, de Landa posits, they allow for the creation of the Pandemonium, an abstract machine concrete enough to allow the control of physical processes, but abstract enough to allow the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos (de Landa 1991, p. 291). These pandemoniac conditions seem to resemble those identied at the onset of disruptive innovations. The beginning of the Internet is a good example of this state. On one hand, the connection of computers was minimally organised through a common language and, on the other hand, the usage and benet of a network of talking computers was not yet clear to anyone. The combination of crowdsourcing as a form of open network, which places the human at the centre of creative endeavours and De Landas surmise as described above lead to the following assumption: Organisations will be able to bring about disruptive innovations through the deployment of crowdsourcing initiatives. This assumption makes it worth exploring a few notions in the current literature and discourses concerning collaboration, the role of ICT technology and the innovation new types of collaboration can bring about. A discourse analysis of the statements the Occupy Wallt Street movement has produced reveals that the current economic and political system is not human centred and not based on social consensus. The movement demands more self-determination and democracy. The discourse analysis has also shown that these new behaviours might have their origins in the way humans interact with new technologies and the higher connectivity it enables.

Manuel de Landa has borrowed this term from Gilles Deleuze to refer to the overall set of self-organizing processes in the universe. These include all processes in which a group of previously disconnected elements suddenly reaches a critical point at which they begin to "cooperate" to form a higher level entity (de Landa, 1991, p. 6 and 7) 4

Scholars seem to agree that an undened group of people collaborating off-line or online can make better decisions than individuals. However, the expert voices are not clear whether online collaboration can produce innovation. Three different approaches, corporate strategy, technology & engineering and design thinking, have become common practice to bring about this type of change. However, their effectiveness and the degree of radicalness they can bring about is very much contested as well. The literature review also reveals that there are no unambiguous and generally accepted denitions of innovation. These discourses lead to the question of the disruptive innovations that online collaboration has produced so far. Furthermore, it is worth investigating the possible reasons for the results discovered as they might give an indication about how these systems might evolve in the future.

What is the degree of innova)on that an online community has brought about for an organisa)on?
This chapter discusses the current results of crowdsourcing initiatives. In a rst step and for the purpose of answering this very rst question it is necessary to establish a common understanding of the concepts involved. The main concepts to be dened are 'disruptive innovation and 'crowdsourcing'3 .

The concept of innova.on

Since there is no 'single or ofcial or widely accepted denition' (Green, 2010) of the term innovation, it is necessary to resort to a variety of different sources and synthesise new denitions to check the validity of the assumption. For the term innovation the following denition has been synthesised through the combination of different statements from the current discourses: A new thing or system, which didnt exist before. It is neither a solution to an existing problem (Green, 2010) nor the satisfaction of a current demand (Briggs 2012), but it generates value by itself and is therefore adopted by a large number of people over a certain period of time (Christensen, 1997). This denition has been extended to include theories of innovation established by Christensen in the Innovators dilemma4 in order to setup a denition for disruptive innovation: A disruptive innovation5 is a new thing or system, which didnt exist before. It is neither a solution to an existing problem nor the satisfaction of a current demand, but it

The present section does not pretend nor adhere to generally accepted denitions; it does not pretend to set conclusive denitions either. It merely tries to determine the scope and the boundaries of the meanings for further use in this research. Denitions established here will serve solely as a common platform for understanding and will not be conclusive.
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In order to produce a more generally applicable denition of Christensen's ndings the scope has been broadened by borrowing the terminology of 'deterritorialisation' and 'reterritorialisation' from Deleuze & Guattari; as well as 'actor' and 'things' from the Actor Network Theory.
5

The terms disruptive innovations and breakthrough innovations will be used in this paper indistinctively 6

generates value by itself and is therefore adopted by a large number of people over a certain period of time. This new thing or system is usually created by a deterritorialised actor at the fringes of an established cultural6 network of actors and things, that is, at a point where the forces of control and power are dampened, and possibly the conditions tend to be chaotic. It is measured according to an unconventional set of values, attributes and their performance trajectories. Established institutions of control and power refuse it for its misalignment to the predominating set of values. Eventually this new thing or system moves out of the current cultural circle and triggers the expansion of a new and formerly non-existent network of actors and things and at some point reterritorialises by overtaking the performance of the old value system; and thus inhibits continuity of the established cultural network.

Image 1 | Course of disrup2ve innova2on

The word cultural is used in this context in its widest sense to include all types of culturally linked people, so that not only corporate culture is included but also other types of cultural networks. 7

Examples of disruptive innovations are steam technology, which led to the replacement of sailing ships by steam-powered ships (De Landa 1991, p. 68). Or hydraulics technology, which has led to the replacement of mechanical steam powered earthmoving equipment (Christensen 1997, pp. 6176).

The concept of crowdsourcing

Increased interaction through ICT technology has allowed online crowds to contribute to several types of tasks. This type of mass contribution to a specic task has been identied and subsumed under the term crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe (Howe, 2006). Taking De Landas assumption in its broadest sense crowdsourcing could be dened as self-organisation of an online crowd that collaborates for a shared goal. A narrower denition, which ts the purpose of hierarchical organisations might be the denition offered by Daren C. Brabham (no date) in Crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem solving and production model. Crowdsourcing blends open innovation7 concepts with top-down, traditional management structures so that crowdsourcing organizations can effectively tap the collective intelligence of online communities for specic purposes. There are many types of online platforms that generate crowdsourcing. They differ from each other according to the design of the following components: initiative 8,9, brief, sponsor, crowd and interaction.

The expression open innovation has been coined by Henry Chesbrough in 2003 to describe a new research and development paradigm in which organisational boundaries become more permeable to outside and inside knowledge ows and thus expedites possible innovation efforts within organisations.
8 9

In this paper the term initiative and challenge will be used indistinctively.

Daren C. Brabham (2011) distinguishes four types: the knowledge discovery and management approach (peertopatent.org), the broadcast search approach (innocentive.com, mathworks.com or topcoder.com), the peer-vetted creative production approach (threadless.com), and distributed human intelligence tasking (mturk.com). 8

Irrespective of the possible types of crowdsourcing, this paper will only examine the approach that deals with creating and selecting creative ideas (Brabham, 2011, p. 6) and where there are 'primarily...cooperative relationships among one another with a substantial amount of technology sharing and deliberate spillovers' (Boudreau & Lakhani, 2009, p. 70). Unlike other types of initiatives10, here the crowd is required to collaborate and funnel down their inputs. Furthermore the only crowdsourcing purpose considered for the present research will be the one in which the sponsor expressively intends to innovate irrespective of the personal understanding of the term innovation.

Current results of crowdsourcing ini.a.ves

A worldwide leading crowdsourcing company 11 has provided a large amount of data related to hundred and twenty three crowdsourcing initiatives carried out between late 2008 and late 2011. Each initiative has produced several ideas of which none, one or more were awarded a prize by the sponsor and one idea received the highest amount of votes by participants of the crowd. The best prized idea as well as the most voted idea of each initiative have been weighted and ranked according to their degree of innovation and disruptiveness12. This ranking has been developed by asking yes or no questions derived from the denition of disruptive innovation established earlier. Possible marks range from 0 (lowest) to a maximum of 7 (highest). The average degree of innovation for the bestprized ideas resulted in a mark of '2.9' and for the most voted ideas '3.8' out of a maximum of 7 points. Although the most voted ideas have rated signicantly higher than the bestprized ones, both rates are rather low. A qualitative analysis of other cases support these results. According to Aitamurto, Leiponen & Tee (2011) the results delivered by the crowd

10

Due to the irrelevance of these other types of crowdsourcing it is deemed unnecessary to explain them in more depth.
11

The name of this company will remain undisclosed for condentiality reasons, any related bibliographical indications have been removed as well.
12

To simplify matters this degree will be called from here on innovation index. 9

at an internal company challenge of Dell were 'regular customer feedback rather than more elaborate or sophisticated business or innovation ideas. A content analysis of several case studies published by the crowdsourcing company Brightidea reveals that the results do show low levels breakthrough innovation as well.

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What could be the possible reasons for the results discovered?

From a global view the reason for these poor results can only be the following: a. Disruptive innovations cannot actively be brought about, they happen without the possibility to inuence them. b. Only individuals, as opposed to groups, can bring about disruptive innovations. c. A group of people interacting online cannot produce disruptive innovations. d. The design of the online crowdsourcing process is not sufcient to produce disruptive innovations. e. External factors related to the organisations initiating the crowdsourcing challenges inhibit the development of disruptive innovations.

Can disrup.ve innova.ons be ac.vely brought about?

Most disruptive innovations come about by a paradigm shift in the way something is understood and accepted by a larger community (Kuhn, 1962). There is no evidence that any shift in paradigm has been realised with previous knowledge of the transformation these shifts will cause, let alone planned and executed accordingly to the results wished for. No conclusive answer can be given regarding point a) yet. But the elements and circumstances that led to a paradigm shift can be studied and understood. Therefore it stands to reason that by recreating similar conditions shifts in paradigm can be caused deliberately.

Can groups, as opposed to individuals, cause disrup.ve innova.ons?

Disruptive innovation is kicked off by an initial act of creativity, be it by an individual or by a group. Nevertheless, current literature (Leadbeater, 2009; Johnson, 2011; Paulus & Nijstad, 2003; Tapscott & Williams, 2008; Surowiecki, 2005) demonstrates that groups of people perform better when it comes to decision-making and creativity.
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Can online communi.es produce disrup.ve innova.ons?

According to Dennis & Williams (2003) there are two factors that foster and ve that impair creativity 13. As opposed to ofine groups, online groups only have one impairing factor and this is social loang 14. But social loang can only be present when individuals collaborating in a group expect to be evaluated and monitored. And the expectation of being evaluated and individually accountable is related to extrinsic motivation (Amabile, 1997). Extrinsic motivations are most often detrimental to creativity (Amabile, 1996, cited in Hennessey, 2003, p. 197). The participants of the analysed crowdsourcing initiatives, however, engage voluntarily through an open call, that is motivated intrinsically and therefore the negative effects of social loang should be minor or non-existent.

Is the design of the online crowdsourcing process adequate to realise disrup.ve innova.ons?
A further reason that could explain the poor results is the design of the crowdsourcing process. There are three dimensions to the crowdsourcing process. The rst dimension is the setting of the variables. The second is the design of the crowdsourcing tool and the last one is how the crowdsourcing tool is deployed within the innovation process.

Se?ng of the variables

The following variables seem to have an inuence on the outcome of any crowdsourcing initiative:

The size of the crowd: According to Dennis & Williams (2003) groups with computerised support increase their creativity performance with increasing group size.

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According to Dennis & Williams (2003) the factors that improve creativity performance are synergy and social facilitation, whereas factors that impair creativity performance are production blocking, social loang, evaluation apprehension, cognitive interference and communication speed.
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Social loang is 'the tendency for individuals to expend less effort when working in a group than when working individually' (Dennis & Williams, 2003, p. 162) 12

Diversity of the participants: It is widely accepted that diversity promotes creative and innovative outcomes (Koch, 2012; Page, 2008; Surowiecki, 2005; Milliken, Bartel & Kurtzberg, 2003; Dennis & Williams, 2003). A relevant point concerning the diversity of the crowd is the process of selection. The crowd can be self-selecting through an open call or the member of the crowd can be selected by invitation from a closed pool within the boundaries of the sponsors organisations. This includes also current customers, who also belong to the wider network of the sponsor.

Anonymity of the participants: Online creative collaboration offers the possibility to engage anonymously. This might eliminate the possibility of evaluation apprehension (Cooper, Gallupe, Pollard & Cadsby, 1998; Dennis & Valacich, 1993 cited in Dennis & Williams, 2003) and to help 'separate ideas from their contributor so that criticism is more easily recognised as criticism of ideas, not of people (Dennis & Williams, 2003, p. 173). Participants in the case of the analysed data belong to an open pool and were able to engage anonymously.

Reward of initiatives: Research shows that intrinsic motivation enhances the creativity performance of individuals and groups (Hennessey, 2003). In general there are tangible and intangible motivations. The former is generated through cash or material prizes. The latter are emotional. These include extrinsic motivation, like the expectation of better overall performance, or intrinsic motivation like peer-recognition.

Convergent interactivity: this is the system that stipulates how the many inputs of the crowd are being funnelled down. This variable was measured according to the number of votes and comments given by the participants for each challenge.

Initial information: this is the brief given to the crowd which determines the task and its goal. Briefs vary according to the degrees of specicity and the novelty sought. For the present data these two degrees have been combined to measure each challenge's brief in terms of its openness.

According to the present analysis of the delivered data it can be stated that the size of the crowd as well as the openness of the brief plays a minor role in respect to the innovation outcome. Unfortunately the effects of anonymity could not be measured in any way.

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On the contrary diversity could play a major role. Even though it can be assumed that the diversity of the participants is higher than that of closed pools, the analysis of the data demonstrates a lack of diversity concerning gender, language and country of origin. The same can be stated from interactivity. In general, the overall level of convergence was very low especially in terms of comments. Furthermore the data delivered suggests that the prize money offered does not represent an effective motivation. Evidence shows that participants might engage with several identities to increase votes for their own ideas. It can be assumed that intrinsic motivation would not trigger off this kind of behaviour and this suggests, in turn, that participants might expect to win a prize money from the sponsor with higher votes from the crowd. According to Harwood (2012) the real motivation is the possibility to have an inuence on a companys decisions and that this company actually listens. This motivation is intrinsic and non-material.

The design of the crowdsourcing tool

The second dimension within the design of the crowdsourcing process is the design of the tool itself in terms of software and conceptual framework around that software. Fayard & Weeks (2011) have identied three design elements that could give answers to why crowdsourcing tools perform so poorly in terms of disruptive innovation:

Concurrent streams & privacy: the possibility of engaging in concurrent streams and the resulting ability to structure and direct cognitive focus is believed to be an important reason for the improved performance of electronic groups (Dennis & Williams, 2003). Fayard & Weeks (2011) also claim that online participants need to be able to move from public group interactions, accessible to all, to private conversations of subgroups or even dyads. None of the crowdsourcing platforms studied offer the possibility to self-organise private subgroups.

Proximity: Fayard & Weeks (2011) argue that people meeting in a virtual space need compelling reasons to start interacting online. They identify the following: a
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core group of participants to bootstrap interaction, easy access to shared spaces and high awareness of others. According to qualitative research most crowdsourcing tools full all of these qualications.

Permission: the former authors also claim that online participants need to be encouraged by management. A crowdsourcing project is usually initiated and promoted by management, which in turn means that they implicitly give permission for participation.

Deployment of the crowdsourcing tool within the innova.on process

Two things become apparent when organisations deploy crowdsourcing projects. Firstly, it is used as a tool only for sourcing ideas. So far, no information has indicated that the crowdsourcing tool is being used for exploration of a problem, gaining insights into human behaviour, or experimentation with conceptual prototypes. Secondly, these projects are usually one-off events. With some exceptions (Koch, 2012) and according to the available data, no sponsor has engaged more than once to launch reiterative challenges in order to allow for a concept to develop. These two facts seem to indicate that the sponsors follow a linear, milestone-based process, and this could be one of the reasons why the results show a low degree of innovation.

Do external factors pertaining to the sponsoring organisa.ons inhibit the development of disrup.ve innova.ons?
The innovation index from ideas generated through the analysed crowdsourcing platform is rather low. This applies to the ideas that the crowd has selected through a convergent process as reected by the most voted ideas. However, the ideas selected by the sponsor (best-prized ideas) had an even lower innovation index. Many organisations limit their crowds to people from within certain boundaries related to their organisations. This seems not to be the only problem, however, since, in most analysed challenges, the crowd was not from within the organisations boundaries.
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Qualitative and quantitative research of crowdsourcing projects have shown that the reasons lie in:

Strict orientation to prot and risk Inclusion of distorting elements into the process of innovation Inexibility of pre-established structures Lack of knowledge about innovation and sociological phenomena

Organisations engage with a crowdsourcing tool at the beginning of the challenge by setting up the brief and stating their intentions; and by selecting ideas during or at the end of the convergence process. An analysis of the briefs has shown that the sponsors have mainly three reasons for initiating crowdsourcing challenges: 1. Creative ideas for internal or external marketing purposes 2. Improvements or incremental innovations for something already existing 3. Revolutionary things or systems that do not exist yet For all three reasons sponsors appear to be searching for innovations but only for the last one they expressively state to be searching for revolutionary things or systems that do not exist yet. But, although they appear to be searching for this last reason, the ideas that could lead to such a disruptive innovation are dismissed by the sponsor. For the sponsors the process of prizing ideas is closely connected to certain evaluation criteria. These have been expressively stated in many of the briefs and are used to funnel down complying ideas. These evaluation criteria are usually the following: 1. Originality and novelty 2. Usefulness 3. Feasibility and ease of implementation 4. Effectiveness and expectation of widespread impact 5. Promptness 6. Cost of implementation
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7. Alignment with a set of organisationally related values like tting with brand, for example All of these evaluation criteria, except the rst one, conne the divergent possibilities to certain boundaries, which lie in the immediate neighbourhood of possible things and systems. These boundaries are related to functionality, reliability (Martin, 2009) and viability (time and money). Some sponsors make the boundary itself the target of the crowdsourcing project when they mention nancial targets like prot or cost savings (Healey, 2012). These boundaries originate from a prot and risk oriented mindedness that avoid that members of the crowd can focus on the only two evaluation criteria relevant to (future) consumers: originality and novelty. Qualitative research has exposed that one of the motivations to engage with crowdsourcing for employees is because they believe that this participation will have a positive impact on their personal performance evaluation process. This evaluation could prove to be distorting because it refers to the relationship between employees and superiors and is not related to the innovative goals of the crowdsourcing project. Furthermore, there is a tendency of pre-established connections and structures to become inexible. One example which demonstrates the reductionist view and the rigidity of structures is a crowdsourcing initiative performed for an energy company (Harwood, 2012). Usually, the cost of energy consumption becomes cheaper the more you consume. Customers and members of the participating crowd decided that this relationship between cost and energy consumption should be reversed; that is, the more energy is consumed the more expensive it should become. The management decided that this was not possible because it was too complicated to change the billing and invoicing systems. This indicates an inexible relationship between humans and systems in the form of machines, software and processes.

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Finally the low compliance between the most voted and the best-prized ideas makes apparent that the organisations way of gaining knowledge is reductionist. They do not take into account the synergistic properties of an ecosystem, which emerges as a result of people interacting with each other (De Landa, 1994). To conclude, these ndings suggest that here could be other important reasons for the low innovation degree ascertained at the beginning of this chapter.

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How could these crowdsourcing systems evolve in the future?

In conclusion, it can be stated that, so far, crowdsourcing has not produced disruptive innovations. However, crowdsourcing does have the potential and the ability to bring about disruptive innovations. Johnson (2011) states that most innovations in history, especially in recent history, have been generated through a network and in a non-commercial environment. The philosopher Pierre Levy (2012) argues that a crowd can solve existing problems 'but for disruptive innovations you need to pose new problems' and that 'we still don't have collective intelligence systems or organisations able to help crowds to pose new problems' (Levy, 2012). This answer refers to the inability to produce such disruptive innovations because of the lack of the right tools or systems, not because of the intrinsic inability of crowdsourcing to do so. The innovation index from ideas generated through the analysed crowdsourcing platform is very low. This applies to the ideas that the crowd has selected through a convergent process as reected by the most voted ideas. If this is true, it can be claimed that the reasons lie mainly in a lack of diversity of the crowd and its low level of interactivity. A higher level of diversity could be achieved through larger crowd size, but other systems could be conceivable through a semi-self-selected process with systems that inhibit a concentration on certain features and with additional voluntaries that bring in more divergent inuences. With regard to interactivity, the tools need probably to be redesigned to encourage a higher amount of interaction in the form of comments between the participants. It would probably be worth designing and experimenting with multi-layered systems both horizontally to allow the crowd to interact more with each other before starting to give nal judgments in the form of votes and vertically to allow for the creation of concurrent substreams. The systems would also need a mechanism that avoids the duplication of ideas.
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So far, crowdsourcing tools have been used to form a component of a very linear, milestone based innovation process. It would be worth experimenting with a crowdsourcing tool that resembles a design thinking approach. It is helpful to think of the crowd as a team of designers, who, rather than being asked to simply deliver ideas to a brief, are asked to become involved within the overlapping spaces of inspiration, ideation and implementation (Brown & Wyatt, 2010, p. 33). This would require a shift in the way crowdsourcing is approached. On the one hand, a major integration of the crowd and the sponsor from the beginning of the process until the nal implementation would be needed. On the other hand, this approach would require the crowd to switch from being idea deliverer to explorative researcher or interpreter (Verganti, 2009). The crowd would become not only the object but also the subject of research. For that to happen, the crowdsourcing system would need to allow for errors (Johnson, 2011) and loop backs in a more institutionalised form. Prototyping and testing of ideas would require that the crowd be involved until the end of the process and in reiterative steps with the possibility of changing the crowds for each reiterative step. In relation to design thinking, crowdsourcing could also be used from a much broader perspective to gain insights about the behaviour of human beings and the emergent properties that evolve through interaction. These new insights, in turn, could lead to disruptive innovations. Most importantly, however, is that organisations choose a different approach in their search for disruptive innovations through crowdsourcing. In a rst step it would be conducive to avoid using crowds that are related to the sponsoring organisation. Furthermore the constraints and rules within a brief and by which ideas are selected should be, neither too narrow or rigid, nor too abstract or loose (Brown & Wyatt 2010; De Landa & Davis, 1992). Brown (2009) claims that the constraints given in a brief need to be balanced. The analysed briefs reveal that the constraints given to the crowd were either
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too constraining or too open. In most cases, the prize went to ideas that were very specic and elaborate. High task specicity indicates that the sponsor is looking for a solution for a precisely formulated problem (Piller & Walcher 2006, p. 310). However, they need to allow for the crowd to pose new problems by giving constraints which are more relevant to people and more compatible with the nature of a disruptive innovation. It is not possible to assess the functionality, reliability and viability of future things and systems, which do not exist yet and for which there is no demand. The answers will be rather abstract, unelaborated and unspecied and demand a broad and long-term view. A right approach for companies could be creating skunkworks in which the perceived corporate risk is kept low. These skunkworks could have more experimental character by including the divergent features of crowdsourcing with crowds completely alien to the sponsor.

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