Crowdsourcing and Organisational Learning in Public Organisations: A Conceptual Model

In the literature on organisation and management the significance of the citizens' growing expectations and the need for openness of public organisations to their voices are emphasised. Particularly, in recent years one observes demands to treat citizens as clients who are interested in participation in decision making. These tendencies are the aftermath of the ongoing public administration reforms but also the interest of public organisations related to including citizens in creating of new products, solutions, and improvement processes. What is more, there are demands mentioning the need to seek knowledge from various sources since it is pointed out that public organisations should treat organisational learning as priority. It leads to improving, adapting to changing conditions and interested parties' expectations, and creating new solutions. In this approach, crowdsourcing seems to gain significance, particularly considering its potential in the scope of facilitating acquisition of new ideas, contents, data, ways of solving problems, and access to human knowledge resources, which are located outside the organisation. It is suggested in literature that public organisations should also reach for such benefits. Despite the ascertainment in the literature that crowdsourcing contributes to acquiring and sharing knowledge, furthermore constitutes support for the processes of managing knowledge, enables access to it, and allows the organisation to learn- still little is known about the dependency between crowdsourcing and organisational learning. An analysis of previous theoretical articles and performed empirical research suggests that there are still not enough studies on the significance of crowdsourcing for organisational learning. Furthermore, there is an attempt to combine crowdsourcing with organisational openness to new external knowledge. The aim of the article is proposing a conceptual model, which combines the notion of crowdsourcing and organisational learning. Its assumption is ascertaining of a connection between the crowdsourcing processes and organisational learning processes. A conceptual model is presented, based on a comprehensive review of relevant literature. It may also constitute an introduction to further research on the importance of crowdsourcing for knowledge management processes.