Thirty Fifth International Conference on Information Systems, Auckland 2014 1 Towards Understanding IT Value Co-creation in Crowdsourcing: the Multiple Stakeholders’ Perspective Research-in-Progress Paper Hee Rui He Aston Business School Aston University, Birmingham, UK her2@aston.ac.uk Julia Kotlarsky Aston Business School Aston University, Birmingham, UK j.kotlarsky@aston.ac.uk Roya Gholami Aston Business School Aston University, Birmingham, UK r.gholami@aston.ac.uk Abstract Contemporary business environment involves IT being invested and shared by multiple stakeholders in collaborative, platform-based, and relational arrangements where the objective is to co-create value. Traditional IT enabled business value therefore has been extended towards IT value co-creation that involves multiple stakeholders. In this paper, we present a conceptual development of IT-based value co-creation in the context of online crowdsourcing. Based on the existing literature, we have distinguished multiple crowdsourcing types (models) by analyzing attributes of crowd, the roles of the client, the platform and the crowd that act as key stakeholders in the value co-creation process, and describe the major interactions between the main stakeholders. Our conceptual development is suggesting different combinations of value co-creation layers to be evident in different crowdsourcing models. Key Words: Crowdsourcing, IT Value, IT Value Co-creation Introduction Over the past decades that witnessed rapid development of internet technologies, there has been a critical shift taking place in consideration of business value, and how this value is created. The business environment has become increasingly dynamic and traditional boundaries of firms are blurring (Kohli and Grover 2008). Firms are seeking to create value with open perspective by utilizing its network rather than closed perspective that solely relies on in-house value creation. For example, Grover and Kohli (2012) argue that “contemporary environments involve IT investments being made by multiple companies in cooperative, platform-based, and relational arrangements where the objective is to co-create value” (p.225). Han et al. (2012) highlight the open innovation paradigm, which moves beyond a closed mechanism to tapping into various stakeholders in the innovation ecosystem. Collaboration and strategic alignment have increasingly been considered on the strategic level (Zajac and Olsen 1993; Kale et al. 2002). This business shift has been reflected in the academic literature. The emerging theme of IT-based value co-creation differs from traditional IT value creation in switching the focus from looking into a single firm to its network. IT value co-creation considers IT investments and the benefits directly and indirectly generated from those investments within inter-organizational networks (Kohli and Grover 2008). The key notion converges to the stakeholder theory (Freeman et al. 2004) which describes value beyond stockholders, involving all relevant stakeholders including shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)