The Impact of Social Media and Crowdsourcing on Organizational Innovation Culture

In this article we investigate how social media-based crowdsourcing systems can be used to reengineer the innovation culture in an organization. Based on a case study of a large engineering consultancy’s use of a social media crowdsourcing system we investigate the impact on the organizations innovation culture using theory on organizational culture and crowdsourcing. The analysis shows that the organizational crowdsourcing event has supported an innovation culture change in the case company towards a more open approach to innovation; creating a new and different awareness of innovation, allowing for internal process innovations, empowering the employees, supporting knowledge work and collaboration across the organization to a new extent and overcoming the traditional hierarchy in the organization.