Tapping into the Collective Creativity of the Crowd: The Effectiveness of Key Incentives in Fostering Creative Crowdsourcing

To better understand the conditions that most effectively stimulate creative participation online, a crowdsourcing project was implemented on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, collecting 4200 written and visual submissions from online participants. An experimental research design tested the impact of specific incentive structures (i.e. financial rewards, bonuses, specification of project purpose, attribution of authorship credit) on the outcomes of creative participation (quantity of submissions, quality of submissions, time spent on task). The study found that extrinsic rewards (i.e. higher pay and bonuses) are effective in encouraging participants to accept the creative task, whereas the strategies that boost the creativity of the submissions are: offering a bonus, mentioning a charitable purpose, and giving contributors authorship credit. These findings help illuminate the factors that have the greatest impact on the quality and quantity of online creative participation, thus making a vital contribution to our understanding of digital creativity.