Send message to Authors

Short Abstract

This paper develops a framework to clarify crowd involvement in science, distinguishing breadth (across project stages) and depth (type of inputs per stage). Applying it to co-created projects, we identify challenges of crowd involvement and suggest directions for research on co-creation in science.

Abstract

A growing number of research projects involve both professional scientists and members of the general public (“crowds”). Although the contributions of crowds are often limited to narrow tasks such as data collection or data processing, policy makers and science advocates call for more extensive involvement, including highly collaborative “co-creation”. However, co-creation can be defined in different ways, making it difficult to understand its potential benefits as well as challenges. To provide greater conceptual clarity, we propose a framework that distinguishes the breadth of crowd involvement across one versus multiple stages of a research project from the depth of crowd involvement at a given stage. We also argue that the key distinguishing feature of deep involvement and of co-creation is that crowd contributions go beyond effort and knowledge to include active participation in decision making. In the empirical part of the paper, we first apply this framework to characterize crowd involvement in co-created research projects from the biomedical field, covering both basic and applied research. We then analyze qualitative data to explore challenges these projects faced, focusing on aspects that related specifically to crowd participation in decision making. Our findings contribute to ongoing debates around crowd involvement in science and suggest important avenues for future research on co-production in the context of science and innovation.