Coca-Cola Corporation: Crowdsourcing Opportunities and Challenges

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of crowdsourcing within the Coca-Cola Corporation. It begins by defining crowdsourcing and its applications, highlighting how Coca-Cola utilizes this model to obtain goods, services, and ideas from a broad network of contributors. The report then examines the major contemporary issues associated with crowdsourcing, emphasizing its role in problem-solving, innovation, and data processing. It explores the business opportunities and benefits of crowdsourcing for Coca-Cola, including increased flexibility, enhanced talent, reduced costs, and faster time to market. Furthermore, the report delves into the ethical issues linked to crowdsourcing, such as undercutting prices, low pay, privacy concerns, and the need for trust and confidentiality. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of addressing these challenges to maximize the benefits of crowdsourcing for organizations like Coca-Cola.

Running Head: INFORMATION SYSTEM CHALLENGERS IN MANAGEMENT –
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Information System Challengers in Management – Crowdsourcing in Coca-Cola Corporation
Name:
Institution Affiliation:
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Crowdsourcing in Coca-Cola Corporation
Crowdsourcing refers to the sourcing model in which Coca-Cola Corporation or
individuals obtain different goods as well as services. It comprises of thoughts and finances from
the great, comparatively open together with often swiftly developing a team of consumers of
internets. The concept divides work among participants with that aim of attaining the cumulative
outcome (Prpić, Taeihagh, & Melton, 2015). The concept of crowdsourcing within organizations
is the portmanteau of the crowd together with the outsourcing that was coined back in the early
days of 2005. Practices of crowdsourcing have generated many arguments on their ethics and
fairness yet the issue has received little attention. According to the report by Uslu & Hancioglu
(2017), crowdsourcing refers to different practices of work based on crowd-based innovation
alongside platforms of freelancing such as InnoCentive or UpWork. It also comprises of open
innovation platforms of massive organizations such as NASA or LEGO along with crowd-based
local marketplaces like Task Rabbit or Uber (Wiatr, 2018). Therefore, the primary target of this
research paper is to examine the concept of crowdsourcing and examine any ethical concerns that
might be linked with Coca-Cola Corporation that use the concept of crowdsourcing.
Major contemporary issue of crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing has become a useful tool when it comes to resolving any problems, online
or offline that need sustained the involvement of human. It is used in most cases to help in the
process of motivating different workers to engage with less rewarding day-to-day routines to
attract the appropriate possible ideas and approaches to boost innovation (Del Savio, Prainsack,
& Buyx, 2016). Crowdsourcing helps to compete for the idea of processing organizational data

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that computing technology has yet to master accurately and in a short duration. Less than the
decade after the introduction of the term in the early days of 2006, it is evident that
crowdsourcing useful to virtually some form of field right from utilizing gamification to drive
the motivation of workers (Liu & Lu, 2016). Therefore, contests of crowdsourcing can be
utilized to solicit multisectoral reaction on programs and designs of health for different
campaigns of a health campaign.
Business opportunities and benefits of crowdsourcing in the Coca-Cola Corporation
The intelligent application of crowdsourcing can possess several benefits for different
organizations alongside non-profit or governmental organizations. The use of internet in current
society is presently melting seal of consumer-generated matter from the different blog to entries
of Wikipedia to YouTube films (Wen & Lin, 2015). Therefore, different organizations that have
skills together with competences to draw on external crowds along with tapping the appropriate
ideas from their internal crowds have the immense merit over those organizations that rely solely
on their internal resources with traditional service organizations. Some of the basic benefits of
crowdsourcing in operations of organization comprise of the idea that it increases flexibility,
enhance talent and ideas, reduce operational costs, improve capabilities, and reduce period taken
to market. Therefore, different organizations such as Coca-Cola Corporation that have the right
skills together with competences to draw on external crowds together within tapping the
appropriate ideas from their ‘internal crowds’ posses the immense merit over other corporations
that depend solely on their internal resources with services that they are founded to attain. Chang
& Chen (2015) argued that, as a strategy of conducting business operations, soliciting the input

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of customers is not new. It is a powerful business tool that is used for marketing to enable all
organization to influence the originality together with the assets of its audience in supporting and
mounting the organization for liberty. From the campaigns of advertising to studying new
commodities to resolving complex roadblocks of business, clients of Coke’s products can
probably offer leadership alongside answers. Hence, crowdsourcing increases rate of
productivity of an organization while minimizes the amount that management spend on labor.
The use of internet has time proven to be an approach for soliciting reaction from the dynamic
and adoring base of consumers (Wang, Qureshi, & Drucker, 2016). It is evident that customers
in present society desire to be concerned in the organizations they do business with, that make
crowdsourcing and its usage in the organization to be an incredibly effective device.
Ethical issues associated with use of crowdsourcing in Coca-Cola Corporation
Different studies around the global society have reported ethical challenges that different
organizations together with individuals face in crowdsourcing. Some of the ethical challenges
that lead to different effects in operations consist of undercutting prices, low pay, deception, and
privacy among other factors (Sims, Bigham, Kautz, & Halterman, 2014). For instance, crowd
workers are a term to e independent contractors rather than workers in the operations of
companies that use the concept of crowdsourcing. Such workers are not guaranteed minimum
wage which remains to be the factor that can reduce the productivity of organizations when
workers that receive little wages withdraws from operations. However, ethical concern in the use
of crowdsourcing might arise in different situations (Hosio, Goncalves, Kostakos, & Riekki,
2015). For instance, when the operations of the organization are comparable to the human

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experiment or if it corresponds to real labor might result due to ethical problems.
Trust and confidentiality
By use of crowdsourcing, every operator needs to improve their trust with organization
stakeholders. The trust with one another can be essential in helping the management of the
organization to maintain confidence in their operations. Therefore, a high level of confidence can
be useful in ensuring that every task is completed with less worry that might in other hand leads
to low productivity (Wen & Lin, 2015). Only in the organization setting respectful of confidence
can the customer safety divulge their personal needs private belie with feelings, together with
different data crucial for the providers to offer quality products as well as services. The need for
privacy or confidentially is a major ethical issue among organizations that uses crowdsourcing.
The privacy in organizations is essential as it allows service providers to consult with coworkers
to offer the best services and products to targeted markets. The consultation within the operations
of organizations needs to be formal or informal (Hosio, S., Goncalves, Kostakos, & Riekki,
2015). The use of crowdsourcing in most cases facilitates informal consultations that raise new
concerns on how best management can improve the provision of their services about
technological developments.
Privacy and Security
Lack of secured systems of organizations can lead to adverse effects in operations of
organizations as they are exposed to different hackers. Such hackers can affect the operations of
the company by stealing the operational data of a given company before they share with their

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rivals, thus reducing their dominance in the markets (Del Savio, Prainsack, & Buyx, 2016). For
instance, there has been a huge concern when providers of different services are offered the
choice to have the request hosted on different serves that are owned by private developers that
they term to be great risk in their operations. Therefore, focusing on different ideas to secure
operational systems make organizations that use the concept of outsourcing to use more funds in
supporting their operations (Uslu & Hancioglu, 2017). Besides, such ideas make the company to
undercut their prices of services to ensure that they remain competitive within the spirited
business society.
Conclusion
The use of crowdsourcing is that it offers different firms such as Coca-Cola Corporation
with access to the potentially huge amount of labor outside of the operations of a firm that can
complete necessary operations. Beyond the mentioned advantages and opportunities in the
organization, the rapid advancement of services of crowdsourcing introduces several issues some
of which are ethical, legal, economic, and others are philosophical. There is a need for providers
of crowdsourcing to focus on ideal approaches to improve the operations of different
organizations around the global community.
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