What makes ordinary people,

who have many interests,

spend so many working hours,

join creative brand contests?

 

This was the initial question,

the one I set out to answer,

through a complex combination,

of interviews and literature.

 

Dozens of long interviews,

with creatives from many countries,

showed how complex it is,

to understand crowdsourcing use.

 

Are they turned on by the brands,

the brief, the platform or their friends?

And does a person’s culture,

influence peer pressure?

 

The results of a long survey,

the highlight of my PhD journey,

is that brief, platform, social pression,

all predict participation.

 

But whether brands are seen as cool,

or the culture’s mediating role,

couldn’t be confirmed by data,

more research is needed later.

 

All these results indicate,

that fun tasks and human touch,

are the best possible ways,

to enjoy crowdsourcing very much!

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🙂

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Why a poem for my PhD?

I just thought it was a fun way to share the dissertation results with you. Once you’re done with this herculean task of writing and defending a PhD, you tend to get bored and your creative juices quickly start flowing again. So you start writing again, and I happened to come up with the above. There are many other creative forms of illustrating PhDs: by dancing, or in 3-minute pitches. For those who would like to get the traditional abstract and citation, I’ve provided it below too.

Abstract of my thesis:

The objective of this thesis is to better understand the participation of internet users in creative crowdsourcing activities, which is often used in marketing to generate new innovation and/or communication ideas. After providing a definition and a conceptual delimitation of the term, we propose a literature review about the participants and their motivations to contribute. We then present the results of three exploratory studies which help us better understanding who these participants are and what influences their participation on a crowdsourcing platform. This literature review and the results of our exploratory studies then allow us to propose a theoretical model based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), and to test it with a questionnaire sent to eYeka community members. The analysis of 1,261 responses as well as secondary data reveals that participation intention is predicted by the members’ attitude towards the brief (which is, in turn, best predicted by the task’s perceived autonomy) and the attitude towards the platform, but not by the attitude towards the brand which sponsors of the contest. Peer pressure is another antecedent to be positively and significantly correlated to participation intention, but the hypothesized moderating effect of cultural variables is not verified. Finally, we find that participation intention positively predicts effective participation, and that this relationship is moderated by the professional status of the individual. We end our work with a discussion of our results and by outlining future research proposals for academics to consider.

Citation of my thesis:

Roth, Y. (2016). Comprendre la participation des internautes au crowdsourcing: Une étude des antécédents de l’intention de participation à une plateforme créative. Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.

Links to the thesis results:

• What Predicts Crowdsourcing Participation? It’s Not As Easy As You Think (eYeka’s blog)
• Understanding internet users’ crowdsourcing participation (in French, presentation slides)
• You can aso find the full-text PDF, in French, on Research Gate and on Mendeley

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About World Poetry Day:

In 1999, UNESCO decided to celebrate World Poetry Day every year on March 21st, “[recognizing] the unique ability of poetry to capture the creative spirit of the human mind.” The objectives of #WorldPoetryDay are to support poetic expression, to offer endangered languages the opportunity to be heard, to encourage a return to the oral tradition of poetry recitals, to promote the teaching of poetry, to restore a dialogue between poetry and other arts, and to create an attractive image of poetry in the media.

And probably to foster and encourage human creativity, no?