Benefits and barriers of crowdsourcing in B2B firms: Generating ideas with internal and external crowds

In recent years crowdsourcing has increased in popularity as a method for gathering ideas for new innovations and providing solutions to existing problems. This means that firms apply the wisdom of crowds to certain tasks and challenges. Various crowdsourcing initiatives and platforms seem to provide new channels and ways to enable this in practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine how business-to-business (B2B) firms can interact with different groups of contributors in order to receive new ideas, feedback and solutions for improving their products and services. Based on theoretical conceptualization, combined with empirical evidence, we propose a layered framework for approaching crowdsourcing in a B2B context. The empirical results of this paper reveal benefits but also practical challenges to overcome before crowdsourcing can be effectively utilized in the B2B sector.