Crowd Dynamics and Crowd Capital: Insights from Five Years of contests in Higher Education

This article aims to study “crowd” dynamics in small teams on the basis of the work presented in Tucci et al. [2016; 2017] and discussed below. Another goal of the study is to provide the setting for experiments in business domains to investigate how crowd characteristics may lower or increase “crowd capital,” here defined as the total number of crowd units having a demonstrated effectiveness in idea generation or task achievement [Tucci et al. 2016]. In particular, the definition focuses on the internal resources of an organization rather than its inner context as “structure, corporate culture, and political context within the firm through which ideas for change have to proceed”[Pettigrew 1987, p.657]. The above definition of crowd capital adopts a more outcome-oriented perspective compared to other definitions emerging from this research stream [Lenart-Gansiniec 2016], complementing the early conceptualization by Prpić et al.,[Prpić and Shukla 2013; Prpić et al. 2015]. Finally, the article aims to contribute to the research on coordination in temporary groups [Valentine and Edmondson 2014] as well as on how to dynamically assemble and manage paid experts from the crowd through flash teams [Retelny et al. 2014]. The paper is structured as follows. First, the theoretical background of the research is discussed. Then, the four studies are outlined. We conclude with a discussion of the main results and final remarks.