Crowdsourcing - the pooling of services, information, ideas and content from a large group of contributors (the crowd) - is an area of convergence for many of the social, business management, and technological dynamics of our time. Utilized both internally and externally to reap the greatest benefit for a firm's agenda, it is not only a product of our digital transformation, but a key component in shaping the continued journey towards full digitization. 

However, a curious trend has emerged in regards to this beneficial tool. Recent reports hail crowdsourcing as the single most effective strategy for innovation while at the same time being the least utilized. When considering the possible underpinnings of this dichotomy, we expect to find several managerial challenges and tensions that are hard to resolve. For example, finding the "right" crowd to approach, and then confronting the choice of formulating a generic vs. a specific problem for the crowd to tackle are paradoxical challenges that may explain the benefit/use divide noted above.

Finding the "right" crowd employs one of two strategies, either building an organisations’ own crowd internally or renting a crowd from commercial providers (e.g. Innocentive, Mechanical Turk, 99designs). The choice of formulating generic vs. specific problems raises its own set of concerns and ultimately impacts the who and how of the crowdsourced problem-solving process. Together, these paradoxical wranglings that innovation managers must confront open a world of new contradictions and considerations. Unraveling these paradoxes to provide the certainty seemingly required to appraise the benefits of crowdsourcing effectively.

The governance challenges and decisions that managers and decision-makers must reconcile in order to create value and foster innovation require experimentation with many new techniques, crowdsourcing among them, revealing a juxtaposition with an organization's existing processes that may seem difficult to overcome and therefore lend to the usage dichotomy. In this contribution, we explore and confront these issues with the understanding that paradoxical exploration and management is vital to business, performance and innovation amidst the pitfalls and opportunities created by today's technology.