“What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” Defining the crowd organization

In this paper, we provide guidelines for strategically using crowds as part of a crowdsourcing strategy and an open innovation portfolio. We start by defining crowd organizations as sustained through a crowd of loosely coupled and mutually aligned agents that achieve their value creation goals through generativity and coordination of collective behavior. Firms, in their crowdsourcing strategies, may organize crowds in different fashions that vary on the control mechanisms applied and consequently on the output in terms of knowledge flows; such fashions encompass crowd-driven, crowd-based, and so-called crowded organizations. The final goal of this paper is not only to call attention to the variance among online collectivities and how their characteristics shape the way that they are organized efficiently, but also to propose how managers might resort to crowd tuning to get the right “frequency” of crowd organizations.