1. PhD Scholar - Amity International Business School, Amity University, Noida (UP) E-mail: ruchigautampant@gmail.com 2. Faculty- International Business and Strategy - Amity International Business School, Noida (UP) E-mail: Msharma9@amity.edu Proceedings of International Conference on Strategies in Volatile and Uncertain Environment for Emerging Markets July 14-15, 2017 Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi pp. 11-17 Airtel “Open Network”: Driving Value from Crowdsourcing Ruchi Pathak 1 and Meghna Sharma 2 Abstract Remarkable achievements have been shown by organizations with a significant change in their mindset about innovation and different methodologies used for it. The users have become more known about everything and when organizations are willing to include the customers they follow processes to where the crowd can come ahead to express their views and ideas. This culture of open participation and collective intelligence of an organisation has given birth to more innovations. In organisations, it helps management to identify multiple solutions to a single problem, shared with its community; The crowd. The present case explores- how organisations are using initiatives like crowdsourcing to capture the wisdom of the crowd. To explore the research objectives the present case uses exploratory research design. This case was written based on narrations taken through personal interviews with project (open network) representatives at Airtel as well as with customers using Airtel connection. Secondary information was collected from Airtel website, reports, newspaper articles, journals and other web-portals. Through this case, researchers have identified the factors in an innovation ecosystem that are required for the collaborative approach used by organisations and reach a win-win solution, and what benefits an organisation can achieve out of such initiatives. Keywords: Collective intelligence, Crowdsourcing, Open Innovation, Open Participation, Social Media. 1. Background of the Study The India’s no. 1 network provider- Airtel started its crowdsourcing initiative in June 2016. It released a 360-degree new Ad campaign to encourage the customer to engage in its initiative with a tagline “because you have a lot to say and we have nothing to hide”. This advertisement captured the attention of users and non-users, who actively participated through social media to provide feedback on Airtel open network. Organisations adopt the strategy of crowdsourcing (open innovation) to gain maximum inputs from the public to value create in their existing business models. Through this crowdsourcing, it was observed that the crowd started giving feedback and reviews to Airtel about the signal connectivity, network availability and voice call quality etc. in their local community. While the innovation started happening through the crowd resolving the network issues, Airtel managed to improve its performance by locating new geographical areas for building towers, increasing its bandwidth connectivity and improving technological space for its users. Today Airtel has developed a structured customer feedback strategy for collecting and analytically managing the inputs received from the crowd. The present