Designing crowdsolving Ba: A closer look at the features of crowdsolving platforms to manage organizational knowledge

This conceptual article contains a proposed four-part categorization of crowdsolving platform features: contest, idea, participant, and community. A related conceptual framework depicts the relationships of these features with the outcomes of creating, transferring, and assimilating knowledge for the platform and its client firms, according to the socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization (SECI) model. Arguments based in Social Capital Theory, Social Cognitive Theory, and Organizational Knowledge Creation Theory inform the predictions about the spiral of interactions between explicit and tacit knowledge that occurs during a contest on a crowdsolving platform. The findings suggest ways to design a crowdsolving ba (shared space for creativity) and platform-level absorptive capacity. For platform managers, this study also offers new insights into the important decisions they must make to develop their platforms’ features.