Ulrich Bretschneider

FernUniversität in Hagen · Department of Business Administration

Agile leadership (AL) is essential for leading agile transformations. So far, a conceptualization of AL is still lacking. To investigate its core characteristics, we conduct an exploratory single case study. Our study examines a senior executive training program within a young European automotive software company, with the objective of establishing...

Crowdworking is increasingly being applied by companies to outsource tasks beyond their core competencies flexibly and cost-effectively to an unknown group. However, the anonymous and financially incentivized nature of crowdworkers creates information asymmetries and conflicts of interest, leading to inefficiencies and intensifying the principal-ag...

Please quote as: Hupe, A.; Bretschneider, U.; Lange, K.; Trostmann, T.; Stubbemann, L.; Leimeister, J. M.; Refflinghaus, R. (2023). Barriers of SMEs in Adopting Crowdsourcing and-working and Strategies to Overcome Them (no. 16) ITeG Technical Reports. Kassel: Kassel University Press.

Crowdworking is characterized by flexibly engaging a workforce that is recruited for only one task. After the task is completed, the crowdworker and the company do not collaborate anymore. To identify the best-suited crowdwoker for a certain task, crowd working platform providers offer different tools to match both parties. Matching a crowdworker w...

Despite its undisputable benefits for firms, crowdsourcing is rarely applied in small and medium sized enterprises (SME), yet. Until today extant literature provides only an uncomplete picture of the barriers that hinder SMEs from adopting crowdsourcing. Because of these incomplete insights on this phenomenon there is a great deal of uncertainty on...

Crowdfunding unterstützt neue Start-ups dabei, den Finanzierungsbedarf der ersten Unternehmensphase zu überwinden. Dieser Bedarf wird über die Unterstützung einer Vielzahl an Geldgebern mit kleinen Geldbeträgen realisiert. Das Ziel dieses Beitrages ist, den aktuellen Stand der Erfolgsfaktorenforschung im reward-based Crowdfunding zu reflektieren un...

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschreibt den Diffusionsprozess von digitalen Technologien und Trends in Familienunternehmen (FU). Die Diffusion von digitalen Technologien und Trends in FU gestaltet sich wegen des Einfluss der Eigentümerfamilie auf das FU im Vergleich zu Nicht-FU grundlegend anders. Eigenschaften der Familie sowie des FU und der digitalen...

Crowdfunding is now established as a valid alternative to conventional methods of financing for startups. Unfortunately, to date, research has not investigated how backers can be encouraged to support entrepreneurs beyond funding. The aim of this study is to design and evaluate certain design elements for reward-based crowdfunding platforms that ca...

Digitalization requires innovations in information and communication technologies for organizations to stay competitive. To this day, IT functions are mainly responsible for providing and ensuring information flows and thus play a key role in the realization of innovations. To manage and use IT in accordance to organizational needs, business/IT ali...

Increasingly, firms follow the strategy of open business model innovation via the Internet. In this form of digital innovation management, firms make use of Internet platforms that allow them to integrate external customers and other stakeholders for (re-)innovation of their business models. However, the used IT tools on these Internet platforms su...

Crowdsourced tasks are very diverse – and so are platform types. They fall into four categories, each demanding different governance mechanisms. The main goal of microtasking crowdsourcing platforms is the scalable and time-efficient batch processing of highly repetitive tasks. Crowdsourcing platforms for information pooling aggregate contributions...

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschreibt den Diffusionsprozess von digitalen Technologien und Trends in Familienunternehmen (FU). Die Diffusion von digitalen Technologien und Trends in FU gestaltet sich wegen des Einfluss der Eigentümerfamilie auf das FU im Vergleich zu Nicht-FU grundlegend anders. Eigenschaften der Familie sowie des FU und der digitalen...

Crowdfunding unterstützt neue Start-ups dabei, den Finanzierungsbedarf der ersten Unternehmensphase zu überwinden. Dieser Bedarf wird über die Unterstützung einer Vielzahl an Geldgebern mit kleinen Geldbeträgen realisiert. Das Ziel dieses Beitrages ist, den aktuellen Stand der Erfolgsfaktorenforschung im reward-based Crowdfunding zu reflektieren un...

To profit from crowdsourcing, organizations can engage in four different approaches: microtasking, information pooling, broadcast search, and open collaboration. This article presents 21 governance mechanisms that can help organizations manage their crowdsourcing platforms. It investigates the effectiveness of these governance mechanisms in 19 case...

Employees increasingly complete organizational tasks using privately owned consumer technologies such as private devices (e.g., smartphones) or private Internet accounts (e.g., email accounts). Higher satisfaction constitutes a major reason for this bring-your-own behavior (BYOB). However, little research has theoretically explored and empirically...

Technology use is a central construct of information systems (IS) research that has been continuously reflected and re-conceptualized in order to understand use behavior. In light of the individualization of IS, use behavior has changed significantly. Therefore, existing conceptualizations, which primarily exist in a utilitarian environment, are no...

Start-ups often face the challenge of a shortage of capital, the so-called funding gap, which can be overcome by raising small amounts of money from a large number of individuals. As crowdfunding suffers from a continuous rise in failure rates, the aim of this article is to contribute to the research concerning success factors in reward-based crowd...

Crowdfunding has become an increasingly popular financing instrument. Research in the field of crowdfunding mainly focusses on broadening access to finance for businesses, in particular young and innovative companies and SMEs. Our study looks beyond the potential of crowdfunding for businesses and focuses on crowdfunding as a digital government str...

Crowdfunding gewinnt als Instrument der Innovations- und Gründungsfinanzierung immer mehr an Bedeutung. Innerhalb der letzten 5 Jahre entwickelte es sich von einem Nischenthema hin zu einer ernstzunehmenden Alternative zu hergebrachten Finanzierungsmethoden. Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, ob und in wie weit die verschiedenen Crowdfund...

Incentive-based forms of crowdfunding – such as reward-, equity- and lending-based crowdfunding – are becoming increasingly popular. However, research that studies backers’ motivations for funding in these environments is still in an embryonic state, revealing an inconsistent and narrow picture. The few existing studies are largely guided by the id...

Enabled by Internet-based technologies, users are increasingly participating and collaborating in idea generation in online innovation communities. However, with the limited understanding of the phenomenon, few studies have investigated what determines the quality of ideas. This study aims at addressing the knowledge gap. We find that idea experime...

Crowdfunding is increasingly gaining attention in theory and practice as a financing instrument for a variety of different projects. Besides fundraising, crowdfunding also serves as a marketing tool. To better understand this effect, we developed a teaching case based on an interview with the company Kinematics about their successful crowdfunding c...

Virtual idea communities (VIC) are a relatively new phenomenon in business. These communities, in which distributed groups of individual customers focus on voluntarily sharing and elaborating innovation ideas, are used by firms to integrate customers into the ideation for new product development rooted in Chesbrough’s (2003) open innovation paradig...

While collaborative business modeling (CBM) constitutes a promising new approach for opening up a company’s innovation process, existing literature lacks empirical evidence of the effects related to this approach. Drawing on related literature on the quality of creative output, this paper proposes that in the context of a CBM initiative, the integr...

In many instances, customers are seen as one of the key resources for new product development (NPD), as they often have deep product knowledge, either in the form of explcit or tacit knowledge. Firms' NPD departments are highly interested in internalizing these forms of customer knowledge with the help of customer integration methods, such as Ideas...

Crowdfunding has enabled various entrepreneurs, artists and other individuals and organisations to bring projects to life. Despite all success stories, 63% of all projects initiated on the biggest crowdfunding platform kickstarter.com and 46% of all projects initiated on the biggest German crowdfunding platform startnext.com, do not raise enough mo...

This paper presents a framework for developing tool support for the design and management of new business models. Existing IT tools supporting the process of designing, innovating, and evaluating a company's business model are currently not leveraging the full potential of tool support, because they do not make use of theoretical and empirical know...

With the number of crowdfunding platforms steadily increasing, it becomes more difficult to attract customers to a particular crowdfunding campaign. This study introduces customer empowerment as a new theoretical concept to study funder participation in crowdfunding. To this end, the paper at hand examines if by systematically empowering funders to...

More and more firms run Virtual Ideas Communities (VIC), such as Dell’s “Ideastorm”, in which customers, namely the crowd, focus on submitting innovative ideas for firms’ new product development and jointly developing these ideas. This Open Innovation- or rather Crowdsourcing-model seems very attractive because customers are highly motivated to fre...

Produkt- und Preisvergleichsseiten erfreuen sich immer größerer Beliebtheit. Nach einer Untersuchung des IfD Allensbach nutzen 54 % aller deutschen Internetnutzer Produkt- und Preisvergleichsseiten (PPS), um sich online über Produkte und deren Preise zu informieren. Aufgrund des relativen Neuheitsgrades dieses Phänomens, gibt es bislang wenige wiss...

Crowdfunding is increasingly gaining attention in theory and practice. Various platforms have emerged, offering entrepreneurs and project owners the possibility to raise money from an undefined group of online users (“crowd”). In this article we aim to provide a deeper understanding of the rise of crowdfunding as an alternative funding opportunity...

It has been a long tradition that patients interact via discussion forums in virtual patient communities (VPCs) to share experiences and information. Nowadays, patients are beginning to develop ideas for innovative products and services within these communication forums. However, ideation in communication forums leads to poorly conceived and not we...

Virtual idea communities (VICs) such as Dell's 'Ideastorm' are very popular in practice. In VICs, customers of firms can submit ideas to support product innovation. This customer-based ideation is not new. Customers have been brought together in lead-user-workshops or focus-groups since the 1980s to support product innovation. However, VICs represe...

Crowdfunding is gaining much attention in theory and practice. Various platforms have emerged, offering different stakeholders the possibility to raise money from an undefined group of online users. Despite the growing interest, there appears to be little understanding of what drives backers to revoke pledged funds. In this research-inprogress pape...

This research-in-progress-paper describes the case of SAPiens, which is a Virtual Ideas Community (VIC). Typically, SAPiens-and VICs in general-focuses solely on supporting the ideation interactions among members. There is evidence from a survey that SAPiens members are also interested in actively signaling competences, experiences and skills to th...

Crowdsourcing has gained much attention in practice over the last years. Numerous companies have drawn on this concept for performing different tasks and value creation activities. Nevertheless, despite its popularity, there is still comparatively little well-founded knowledge on crowdsourcing, particularly with regard to crowdsourcing intermediari...

Web-based innovation platforms (WBIP) are common tools for the integration of customers and other external stakeholders into the product and service innovation processes of companies. WBIP of many large companies are very successful in generating many ideas. This leads to WBIP operators drowning in lots of possibly creative and high potential ideas...

Web-based innovation platforms (WBIP) are common tools for the integration of customers and other external stakeholders into the product and service innovation processes of companies. WBIP of many large companies are very successful in generating many ideas. This leads to WBIP operators drowning in lots of possibly creative and high potential ideas...

Virtual idea communities (VICs) such as Dell's 'Ideastorm' are very popular in practice. In VICs, customers of firms can submit ideas to support product innovation. This customer-based ideation is not new. Customers have been brought together in lead-user-workshops or focus-groups since the 1980s to support product innovation. However, VICs represe...

Equity-based crowdfunding is an increasingly popular source to fund start-ups. In equity-based crowdfunding, a form of crowdsourcing, many crowdfundees collectively fund a start-up by providing parts of the requested funding in prospect of financial returns. While extant research has provided insights into the crowd's motives for participating in v...

Crowdsourcing has gained much attention in practice over the last years. Numerous companies have drawn on this concept for performing different tasks and value creation activities. Nevertheless, despite its popularity, there is still comparatively little well-founded knowledge on crowdsourcing, particularly with regard to the governance of crowdsou...

When searching for user innovations, the identification of so called 'technology lead users' is one of the most important tasks. However, scientific literature indicates that the present me assures to search and to recruit new members imply high spreading losses. As a con-sequence we develop the "Pyramiding 2.0" approach. Building on existing liter...

This research-in-progress paper presents a research project that aims at developing, piloting and evaluating a crowdfunding platform to support financing for start-ups emerging from university. Currently, universities' own financial resources to support setting up businesses from universities are limited. Universities' business foundation consultan...

In Open Innovation, companies open up their innovation activities to external stakeholders. Using web-based ideation platforms (WBIP), companies crowdsource ideas for innovations from their customers. Ideation can be considered as a create process. Therefore, in this research we analyze how current web-based ideation platforms run by firms support...

In existing virtual ideas communities (VICs) there are no functionalities that allow members to signal directly their skills and competences. While through submitted ideas, users of VICs can signal their competencies indirectly, a possibility to communicate explicitly their skills and competencies is missing. Drawing from existing literature within...

In recent years many companies have started integrating their customers into product and service development processes. This phenomenon is known as Open Innovation (OI). In OI research, especially the integration of customers into the early stages of product or service innovation has caught a lot of attention in theory and practice. Especially sin...

Software testing has become highly expensive in terms of time, money and other resources. Further, the classical in-house testing is restricted to the knowledge of a small set of solvers and thus is limited in terms of quality and efficiency. Recognizing this, the German start-up company, testCloud, implemented a crowdsourcing business model offeri...

Enabled by Internet-based technologies, users are increasingly participating and collaborating in idea generation in online innovation communities. Beyond increasing the quantity of ideas contributed by users, firms are looking to obtain innovation ideas of better quality. However, with the limited understanding of the phenomenon, few studies have...

Virtual Communities for Innovations (VCI) are becoming increasingly popular as platforms for firms to engage customers in generating new ideas. While several studies have explored the various motivations of user participation in VCI, the relationship between the motivations and the outcome of interest -the quality of the ideas -has not been explore...

Crowdsourcing is a practice employed by many types of organizations that makes use of the internet to harness the time, energy, and talents of individuals who are otherwise unconnected to the organization. Hana Shepherd explores some of the many creative uses of crowdsourcing and discuss the issues the practice raises in terms of the nature and fut...

In this research in progress paper we report on our efforts to recruit idea contributors for a topic-related ideas competition. Due to the narrow topic of the competition, we expected our present marketing measures to imply high spreading losses. As a consequence we adapted the pyramiding approach for use in an online-based setting. As the study th...

In order to react to increasing competition for new students, European universities need to become more attractive and listen to the demands of their students. Open Innovation has proven to be an effective way for the integration of new stakeholders into innovation processes and increase innovativeness. This paper describes the application of a fra...

More and more firms make use of virtual communities to interact with customers, particularly in the light of open innovation. Although companies invest enormous effort in developing virtual communities just a minority of these succeed. That means that firms were either unable to recruit the critical mass of users or to motivate users to publish and...

In many instances, customers are seen as one of the key resources for new product development (NPD), as they often have deep product knowledge as well as experience and creativity potential gained by regular product usage. From knowledge management perspective, customers’ input to NPD is manifested in different forms of knowledge. Customers’ input...

Idea Communities allow their users to contribute to a company’s innovation activities by sharing their ideas with the Community. These ideas are then improved according to the Mass-Collaboration principle. Due to the high diversity among the participants, a shared understanding and a common goal is hard to develop in a mass collaboration environmen...

Virtual ideas communities such as Dell’s “Ideastorm” or Intel’s “Ideazone” are very popular in practice. In such communities distributed groups of individual customers focus on voluntarily sharing and elaborating innovative ideas to support company’s new products development. However, a look at existing ideas community leads to the conclusion that...

Open innovation research shows that idea competitions are a promising approach for integrating customers and that most innovations are a result of intensive collaboration (Franke and Shah, 2003; Gascó-Hernández and Torres-Coronas, 2004; Nemiro, 2001; Sawhney et al., 2005). Thus, fostering collaboration among idea contributors might be a fruitful ap...

Research has shown that idea competitions are a promising approach for integrating customers into open innovation activities. Furthermore research on open innovation shows that most innovations are the result of intensive collaboration processes in which many individuals contribute according to their specific strengths (20, 22, 39, 47). So, fosteri...

Information technology is a central enabler for the succesful implementation of open innovation. In this article the research project GENIE „Gemeinschaftsgestützte Innovationsentwicklung für Softwareunternehmen“ (community based innovation development for software enterprises) is presented that implements open innovation strategies through an intel...