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ABSTRACT
Innovative businesses worldwide are increasingly engaging customer collectives andintegrating their customers closely to their operations and decision-making processesthrough crowdsourcing, soliciting an open invitation to participate in businessactivities.I set out in my master’s thesis build a framework for open collaboration with digitalcustomer communities – recently termed crowdsourcing – and as a result, the FLIRTmodel was built. The model is proposed as a functional framework for identifying andunderstanding the key elements for engaging digital customer communities for company goals.The current thesis is building on previous discussion on collaboration in business byrecognized authors such as James Surowiecki and Chris Anderson illuminating thewider phenomenon around digitalization of consumption and the culture of participation that this encourages. Quite naturally, I am also tapping firmly to theacademic discourse surrounding modern, open customer collaboration as conducted by e.g. Füller et al., Ogawa and Piller, von Hippel, Jeppesen, Prahalad andRamaswamy, Lakhani, Nambisan, Bouras and many others.The current thesis aims ultimately to act as a unifying theory for researchers, but onethat has solid practical applicability as a comprehensive handbook for marketingmanagers and executives at large traditional companies but also entrepreneurs andactors working with web native startups that are born directly to global competitionand also global customer collaboration.The empirical part of the thesis consists primarily of netnography gathered from public online discussions by industry experts, consultants, researchers andentrepreneurs, and secondly of thematic, illustrative case examples drawn from themost talked about crowdsourcing companies at present.The results show that the FLIRT model indeed is a relevant, valid and timely way of approaching the challenges posed by wide-audience customer collaboration utilizingdigital channels – or crowdsourcing – as it is now commonly known.
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