We are excited that the work of Amanda Porter, Philipp Tuertscher and Marleen Huysman for KIN Center for Digital Innovation, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, was selected as a Distinguished Winner of the 2022 Responsible Research in Management Award, co-sponsored by the Academy of Management Fellows Group and the Community for Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM)
The Fellows Group of the Academy of Management recognizes and honors members who have made significant contributions to the science and practice of management. This annual award recognizes and celebrates recent research that benefits society by producing credible and useful knowledge. Credibility refers to the reliability, validity and trustworthiness of research findings that arise from either inductive or deductive methods, using quantitative and/or qualitative data. Usefulness refers to the potential of research findings to make the world a better place by informing policy and influencing practice.
Summary
Porter, A. J., Tuertscher, P. & Huysman, M. (2020). Saving Our Oceans: Scaling the Impact of Robust Action Through Crowdsourcing. Journal of Management Studies, 57(2), 246-286. DOI: 10.1111/joms.12515
Collaboration between business, government, and citizens is necessary to generate and implement innovative solutions that reduce harm to our environment and revitalize our natural world. Yet a pitfall of many such collaborative efforts is that they progress slowly and fail to keep pace with urgent threats to the earth’s sustainability. To address this puzzle of scholarly and societal significance, we show how organizations tackling grand challenges can effectively accelerate and scale impact through crowdsourcing.
In an in-depth longitudinal study, we analyzed an award-winning collaborative crowdsourcing initiative that developed innovations for the sustainable use of oceans within the maritime industry. Our findings show that, by generating engagement of new actors across all phases of the crowdsourcing process, the initiative connected stakeholders who have a deep understanding of the problem with organizations that have resources to develop solutions. Moreover, our study reveals the importance of retaining novel knowledge generated by one set of stakeholders for use by other stakeholder groups that continuously change over time. Based on these observations, our study offers actionable insights into how conventional management approaches and the implementation of digital technologies need to be adapted to organize collaboration for sustainable development.
