Scaling crowdsourcing platforms: How to expand and sustain value creation and value capture with crowds

Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,0, University of Innsbruck (Department of Strategic Management, Marketing and Tourism), language: English, abstract: Over the last years more and more companies have opened up their corporate boundaries and have built their business model upon the crowd. The creation of a crowdsourcing platform is a challenging endeavor, because on the one hand the crowd needs to be involved in the value creation process. On the other hand, to successfully keep them on the platform, the crowd needs also to be involved in the value capture process. To identify the main challenges a crowdsourcing platform needs to overcome in order to scale effectively, qualitative interviews with platform managers and founders, experts and platform participants were conducted. The results illustrate that the most important factors concering successful scaling are platform infrastructure, communication and community management.