How to Design an Engaging Online Crowdsourcing Contest in Organizations? Lessons from a German Sportswear Company

Organizational transformation efforts hinge critically on securing the active involvement and support of employees. One promising approach to foster employee involvement is internal crowdsourcing. To activate meaningful participation in these initiatives, however, organizations need to design solutions that invoke employee motivation and engage contributions. This article presents how a German multinational sportswear company used gamification in an internal crowdsourcing contest to engage employees, particularly employees without specific IT skills, to generate ideas for robotic process automation use cases and drive the company’s digital transformation. Following an ADR approach, we derive four design recommendations for internal crowdsourcing contests based on the insights gathered by conducting this project. The recommendations add to the growing literature on crowdsourcing and gamification and can support practitioners in successfully applying such approaches in internal transformation initiatives.