Designing Algorithmic Governance for Creative Crowdsourcing Platforms: A Cognitive Perspective
This is a joint seminar organized by HKU Business School’s IIM Area and Institute of Digital Economy & Innovation (IDEI).
Prof. Ning Su
Associate Professor
Information Systems and Strategy
Ivey Business School, Canada
Creative crowdsourcing, which leverages online platforms to contract tasks such as graphic design, animation design, advertising design, and game design, to a large and diverse pool of designers, has become an important solution for talent acquisition and innovation in today’s economy. From the perspective of the online platform, facilitating exchanges among a large pool of participants with diverse backgrounds on such tasks can be challenging, due to potential clients’ and designers’ oftentimes divergent interpretations of their exchange. This research explores how an online outsourcing platform can effectively address this challenge. Based on a qualitative case study of one of the world’s largest online platforms for creative crowdsourcing, the emergent theoretical model unpacks how the platform’s design of governance mechanisms, involving both algorithms and human administrators, can play pivotal roles in shaping the interpretations of clients and suppliers, thereby enabling the initiation and completion of creative crowdsourcing.
Ning Su is Associate Professor, Information Systems and Strategy, at Ivey Business School, Canada. Ning’s research examines global sourcing and innovation strategies, and qualitative research methods. His research is published in journals including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and MIT Sloan Management Review. Ning has also published over 70 cases, including a set of bestselling cases distributed by Harvard Publishing, The Case Centre, UK, and the European Foundation for Management Development. He is the recipient of the MIT Sloan Management Review annual top-10 articles recognition, the Association for Information Systems SIG Sourcing inaugural annual best article award, and annual best article awards from the Decision Sciences Institute and IBM Global Research. Ning received Bachelor’s degree from Fudan University, MSc from the University of Toronto, and PhD from New York’s Stern School of Business.
