Opening open innovation : a multi-theoretical perspective on intermediaries in online community-based innovation

Although existing crowdsourcing studies have significantly advanced this relatively young domain within OI, they focus almost exclusively on intermediaries facilitating tournamentbased crowdsourcing for technical problem-solving, and have seemingly ignored other modes of intermediation (Colombo et al., 2013).As a result, we know far less about how organizations those involving users or consumers .Furthermore, research on Consider the case of Edmunds, an online intermediary that enables its clients, based in the automobile industry, to obtain ideas, opinions, and feedback from a community of users or consumers of automobiles.Here, the newly obtained knowledge feeds into a range of internal innovation processes, such as launching a new model into the market.In this way, Edmunds acts as a helping auto manufacturers integrate the market-and/or customer-based knowledge through online communities into their OI processes.To do so, Edmunds provides its clients with infrastructure in the form of a digital platform, tools, and access to the community, and helps them become competent in running their own community projects to directly collaborate and integrate user-based knowledge into their OI process (Diener and Piller, 2013; Verona et al., 2006).Edmunds is only one of many such online intermediaries serving Table 1: Overview of Research Output