Risk Management in Crowdsourcing-Based Business Ecosystems

The benefits of crowdsourcing are enabled by open environments where multiple external stakeholders contribute to a firm's outcomes. However, crowdsourcing typically has been examined as a general process and not from the specific perspective of a mechanism for driving value creation and capture within a business ecosystem. In this conceptual article, we highlight this research gap by examining crowdsourcing from a business ecosystem perspective and by identifying the inherent business risks in crowdsourcing-based business ecosystems. We apply the concept of ecosystem health to the crowdsourcing context, in terms of how firms create and capture value, and we examine the methods by which these firms can maximize health by mitigating risk in crowdsourcing-based business ecosystems.