Green crowdsourcing: The role of social media for growing eco-product demand and eco-innovation

Information technologies have brought new environmental challenges. Products with short lifecycles are resource intensive and often tangled in obsolescence and compatibility issues. Luckily product cycle speed has come along with connectivity, enabling the emergence of new grounds for stakeholder interaction and value creation. Two key aspects of this dynamic will be considered. Firstly, social media have become important sales and marketing channels, giving rise to collective trends in consumption. Secondly, crowdsourcing opens up models for collaborative value creation and becomes a source of open co-design of desirable and therefore sustainable products. Sustainability topics are currently addressed on generic open-innovation platforms. In this paper we identify and propose an extension of existing practices and models, in order to increase the emergence of sustainable solutions through green crowdsourcing.