A quantitative study of influencing factors on crowd participation in a crowdsourcing project for consumer product design

Abstract

Nowadays, crowdsourcing has become a popular concept and is widely used in many social, economical and technological areas. For consumer product design, crowdsourcing is implemented extensively with many cases. Although there has been a lot of research on the application of crowdsourcing for product design, the big picture of how factors influence the participartion of individuals from the crowd in a crowdsourcing project for product design has not yet been understood. This paper aims to investigate the relationships of crowd participation and influencing factors including: process, product, and reward. To do this, we conducted a survey on a crowd of engineering individuals and analyzed the collected data with data mining techniques. Main findings include the relationships of crowd participation versus process, product, and reward factors as well as regression models to predict crowd participation.