Crowd-Open and Crowd-Based Collaborations: Facilitating the emergence of organization design

Interorganizational collaboration (IOC) is “a cooperative, interorganizational relationship that is negotiated in an ongoing communicative process, and which relies on neither market nor hierarchical mechanisms of control” (Hardy, Phillips, & Lawrence, 2003, p. 323). For at least three decades, IOC has attracted scholarly attention and many studies have unveiled the inner dynamics of partnerships, joint ventures, alliances, outsourcing deals, consortia, and the like . More recently, new phenomena have appeared in the changing landscape of IOC, affecting the way in which organizations are open to interact with, and rely upon, other actors that may be stand-alone entities as well as representatives of other organizations. These actors operate “betwixt and between” the organizational core (management, full-time employees) and its external environment(s), populating a liminal space located at the boundary of the organization in which activities take place according to non-proprietary and non-employment logics. The idea of involving actors on a temporary basis – rather than employing them – has been explored by studies on project-based and temporary organizations. However, crowd-focused organizing goes beyond the mere projectification of business activities and project-based organizing and opens new avenues for practice and research on entire ecosystems. We focus on these forms of collaboration which blur the lines between organizations, calling into question the fundamental label of crowd-focused IOCs. We consider two forms: crowd-open organizations which are traditional organizations involving crowds in practices like innovation challenges (e.g., Intel, Reebok, or Lego), and crowd-based organizations which rely mainly on crowds for accessing and exploiting globally distributed extra-organizational resources (physical assets and/or human talent), on a scale and a variety that would be impossible to enclose within traditional organizational boundaries. The organizational design impact of openness spans from the mere scalability associated with organizational growth (e.g., in cases like Airbnb or MyTaxi) to the phenomena of reshaping formalization and standardization of roles and processes, and self-organizing over time in extreme cases like HTT. We also see intermediate effects in cases where organizations adjust initial coordination mechanisms and engagement schemes (e.g., Uber).