The use of crowdsourcing mechanisms in management learning

While management education increasingly uses creative crowdsourcing techniques (e.g. hackathons and innovation crowdsourcing) to help students apply their knowledge to real business problems, this research examines crowdsourcing as a learning approach that enhances students’ learning experience, not by giving access to knowledge resources, but rather by creating a process that generates value and learning experience through active participation. Using an exploratory research (i.e. observations and in situ interviews) and a quantitative assessment (i.e. survey-based design), our findings show that students’ learning experience can be leveraged in the pre-activity stage (i.e. initial instructions, creative idea generation), and during and after the crowdsourcing activity (i.e. feedback from the company and from the instructor). We show that the learning experience is not only predicted by the informational value, but also by the social and enjoyment value, which can be enhanced through specific crowdsourcing activities. Further, our findings question the role of competitive settings in such learningconditions.