The Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization is present at leading international conferences:

• Open and User Innovation Conference 2014 at Harvard Business School in Boston

• Academy of Management Conference 2014 in Philadelphia

 

At the Academy of Management Conference the paper  '„Does God play Dice?” Randomness vs. Deterministic Explanations of Crowdsourcing Success' (see abstract below) was nominated for the Best Paper Award of the Technology and Innovation Division. Further Dr. Steffen Keijl was awarded with the 'Best Reviewer'award.

Franke, N.; Lettl, C.; Roiser, S. Türtscher, P. (2013) „Does God play Dice?” Randomness vs. Deterministic Explanations of Crowdsourcing Success

Abstract:

Which factors are responsible for the success of crowdsourcing tournaments? Current theorizing on crowdsourcing appears to assume that there is a deterministic relationship between factors such as the organization of the tournament, characteristics of the participants attracted, and specific situational factors on the one hand and the quality of their contributions gained on the other. Based on theory which views creativity as a process of blind variation and retention, we introduce the alternative idea that in fact the originality of any participants’ idea is largely random and thus the success of the tournament rests on the number of participants attracted. In order to compare the explanatory power of randomness and 22 deterministic factors derived from literature we conducted a huge experiment in which 1,089 participants developed ideas for apps. Our finding is crystal clear: randomness outperforms deterministic explanations by over 500%. It appears that at least in crowdsourcing, God indeed plays dice.