Tapping into diversity through open innovation platforms: The emergence of boundary-spanning practices

Crowdsourcing for innovation is gaining critical momentum, with an increasing number of organizations engaging with digital platforms. While collecting ideas from a broad set of participants is now easier than ever, combining and deploying them in innovative ways is becoming increasingly difficult. As a result, organizations are faced with challenges in productively integrating ideas generated by the crowd. Organizations seeking to learn about and combine new perspectives have traditionally turned to consulting companies to tap into external expertise. In this chapter, we compare how consulting companies approach the problem of translating and integrating across a diversity of expertise with how external innovation is addressed in innovation-focused crowdsourcing platforms. We examine the nature of boundaries that arise in both types of endeavors and draw on boundary-spanning theories to develop an understanding of the differences between traditional ways of integrating diverse ideas compared with digitally mediated approaches.