Gamification in Enterprise Crowdsourcing

Abstract

In an era where innovative machine learning and artificial intelligence applications are gaining popularity, enterprises steer their interest to enterprise crowdsourcing, to capitalize on their available human resources to achieve inclusion of in-house human generated data. In this setting, gamification techniques are appealing in order to align employees’ motivation to the crowdsourcing endeavor. Although hitherto, research efforts were able to unravel the wide arsenal of gamification techniques to construct engagement loops, empirical studies have been limited to the experimentation of only a few. More importantly little research has shed light into the social game dynamics that those foster and how those impact crowdsourcing activities. In the current study we adopt a user-centric approach to apply and experiment with gamification for enterprise crowdsourcing purposes. Through a qualitative study, we highlight the importance of the competitive and collaborative social dynamics within the enterprise. By engaging 75 and 26 employees in a mobile crowdsourcing application across two large multinational enterprises, we showcase the effectiveness of competitiveness towards higher levels of engagement and quality of contributions. Moreover we underline the contradictory nature of those dynamics, which combined might lead to detrimental effects towards the engagement to crowdsourcing activities.