Governing crowd-based innovations: an interdisciplinary research agenda

The crowd increasingly plays a key role in facilitating innovations in a variety of sectors, spurred on by IT-developments and the concomitant increase in connectivity. Initiatives in this direction, captured under the umbrella-term ‘crowd-based innovations’ (CBI), offer novel opportunities in all domains of society by increasing the access, reach and speed of services and goods. At the same time, they signify important challenges because these innovations occur in a context of traditional, well-established institutional arrangements. CBI create an ‘institutional void’: existing rules, standards and practices are challenged and renegotiated. This raises questions about the safeguarding of public values such as quality, legitimacy, efficiency and governance of crowd-based innovations. The objective of this perspective piece is to present an interdisciplinary research agenda to address normative challenges for governing CBI. We will argue that such an agenda needs an integrated empirical-normative approach. We will detail three lines of empirical-normative research that together build up towards an interdisciplinary agenda.