Investigating how companies leverage crowdsourcing in times of COVID-19 pandemic

Crowdsourcing offers many opportunities to organizations to innovate, leverage external knowledge and resources, and coordinate specific processes more efficiently. This paper explores whether and how firms have used crowdsourcing as an innovative model during the COVID-19 pandemic, a disruptive event with severe economic, health, and social consequences. By adopting a qualitative empirical methodology, we explored and analyzed how firms leveraged crowdsourcing to respond to the issues posed by the pandemic. For this purpose, we adopted a multiple case study strategy and performed a thematic analysis, from which four main themes emerged: levers for adoption, benefits, disadvantages, and impacts. This work provides two contributions. It enriches the discussion in the literature by providing evidence about motivations, benefits, and drawbacks for the use of crowdsourcing during crises. Secondly, by uncovering lessons and best practices from the current response, it provides suggestions that companies could adopt in the future in similar situations.