“Organizations have used these transformations to their benefit, to access critical ecosystem participants and co-create products and services. Thus, the traditional paradigms of entrepreneurship, R&D, and innovation, that we knew of, have been disrupted.

“Globally, we are seeing a rapid transition from closed innovation and traditional venture funding models to novel models of open and collaborative innovation.

“As a management scholar who conducts research on innovation, entrepreneurship, crowdfunding, these paradigm shifts are of great interest to me and my track co-organisers.

“Our R&D Management Conference track in 2024 focused on research on crowds, bringing together interesting articles from many countries from a variety of topics, such as the use of artificial intelligence to study crowds and crowd behaviours toward green technologies.

“This year, we aim to advance this knowledge and conversations further by advancing novel research discussions about how crowds are evolving and how crowds are shaping innovation and entrepreneurship for ventures and large companies.”

Track 5.2 Exploring the role of crowds in technology management, R&D management and entrepreneurship

The role of crowds, especially in the arena of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding is attracting increasing attention over recent years. While there has been some research to improve understanding of how the crowds integrate into innovation, new product development, and entrepreneurial activities for larger firms as well as ventures,  more work is required to explore how crowds interact with platforms, new digital technologies, and other entities in innovation ecosystem.

This track focuses on bringing together conceptual and empirical research on crowds in innovation and R&D management from diverse theoretical perspectives.

We welcome different methodological approaches – quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods and multi-disciplinary research on this topic.