Can Crowdsourcing Really Be Used in B2B Innovation?

The aim of this research is to explore the use of crowdsourcing especially from business-to-business companies‟ innovation perspective, and to create a more comprehensive picture of the possibilities of crowdsourcing for companies operating in business-to-business markets. Business-to-business context was chosen because it is in many ways a very different environment for crowdsourcing than business-to-consumer context, and we found no academic studies on the topic. A systematic literature review was performed to gain an understanding of the state-of-the-art, and to create a research framework on the concept of crowdsourcing in innovation covering e.g. the type of crowdsourcing used, which crowds were used and in what innovation process phase crowds were utilized. Concerning the current ways of using 'crowds' and crowdsourcing in B2B innovation process, we found evidence of using crowdsourcing in B2B‟s in all the three innovation process phases: front-end, product development, and commercialization. Furthermore, evidence was found for crowdsourcing to be used in innovation mainly in the manner of crowd creation, crowd wisdom and crowd funding. We found that the role of social media was quite essential in all the found B2B crowdsourcing examples.