Research On Factors Affecting The Masses' Behavior Of Participation In Crowdsourcing

Companies are continuously exploring innovative models under the situation of increasing global competition and continuously shortening product life cycle. Crowdsourcing is a new business model which has risen recent years. In 2006, Howe (2006) first proposed the "Crowdsourcing", "it is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent(usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call". In recent years, crowdsouring focused by more and more well-known companies at home and abroad. Procter & Gamble, Boeing, DuPont and other leading companies posted R & D challenges on the "Innocentive" website to seek the public's help; IBM, IKEA, L'Oreal, Dell and other well-known companies have also started the practice of crowdsourcing. "Youku", "Baidu", "Zhubajie.com" and other sites are Chinese crowdsourcing platform.The core of crowdsourcing is companies use resources come form the masses outside of the companies to complete the internal task. Internal resources are limited, and the resources formed by the masses network are very rich, companies those embedded the masses to their own network could access to intellectual resources at lower cost. The application of crowdsourcing can help companies achieve the goal of open development, across organizational boundaries to use the wisdom of the external network, integrating resources both inside and outside, expand the source of business innovation, optimization and reshaping innovation models and organizational forms. Meanwhile, for the embedding of consumer network, the distance between businesses and consumers become shorter, companies can get demand information of consumer faster and more accurate, all of these have a good effect to the enhancement of competitiveness of enterprises, and this is the reason why so many companies pay attention to crowdsourcing.As more companies applied crowdsourcing, the academic community has also given a wide public concern to it. The key to apply crowdsourcing is incentive a large group of people to participate, only the public willing to participate, it is possible to form the intellectual resource pool to make up the lack of internal resources. Meanwhile, the academic researches about the participant of crowdsourcing is one of the research focus currently. Existing studies focus on the motivation of the participants, most of scholars study the masses willingness to participate and their behavior of participation from the perspective of motivation. However, there are many factors could affect public participation behavior, so the research perspective should not only on the motivation. Therefore, this paper attempts to study the factors those affect crowdsourcing participants'behaviours from a multiple perspectives, from more perspectives to explore the factors affecting the behavior of participants in crowdsourcing. This study has theoretical value both for the business innovation research and the studies related crowdsourcing, while it also has some practical significance for guiding companies to carry out certain crowdsourcing activities.This study is expected to answer the academic question" what factors should take into consideration when companies want to encourage the public to actively participate in crowdsourcing, and how to increase their participation results." This study discussed the rise of crowdsourcing and its reasons for the rise, the existing types of crowdsourcing, and combined with user innovation theory, theory of open innovation, mass production study and other studies relate with crowdsourcing to study the theory of meaning of crowdsourcing.and on the base of literature review, and discovered some shortage of the current theoretical research, and established this article's research questions. Meanwhile, in order to combine the major domestic crowdsourcing mode, this paper selects witkey's paticipants as research objective because "witkey" is the most popular mode of crowdsourcing in china. The paper also discusses Witkey meaning, origin, type and its operation mode. In addition, in order to study from different angles to explain the behavior of public participation in crowdsourcing, the paper also introduces "Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model"(UTAUT) to explore the factors will affect the masses' behaviours. Meanwhile, this paper apply interviews surveys, questionnaires, SPSS and other research tools to explore the factor "Performance Expectancy", "Effort Expectancy" "Trust" and "Facilitating Conditions" whether affect public's behaviours in crowdsourcing, and their impact.The results show that the expected "Performance Expectancy" and "Trust" will play a significant impact on the public participation willingness. And "Performance Expectancy", "Effort Expectancy" and "Trust" have significant impact on behaviour of paticipation. Meanwhile, the willingness to participate have mediating effect in the process "Performance Expectancy" and "Trust" affect behaviors of participation. On the basis of the conclusions of the study, this paper proposed how to encourage public participation in crowdsourcing, and described the deficiencies in this study and future research prospects.