Crowdsourcing for innovation and the availability of university students: İstanbul Kemerburgaz University

Although the concept of innovation takes place in the list of what needs to be done in the institutions, it has started to get old and insufficient as everything getting old in time. Particularly, the lack of resources and the existence of the large number of the competitors have led institutions and scientists to go one step further. The concept of open innovation has paved the way for the process of integration of innovation that occurs within the institution with the external sources. While searching for variety of tools to use the concept of open innovation in the best and the most efficient manner, the method of crowdsourcing has stepped forward. This method is to benefit from the experience and intelligence of the community which is the most important factor and although this method is very new, institutions have started to benefit from it gradually. The purpose of this study is to introduce the concept of crowdsourcing to the Turkish literature in details and to prove that university students are a suitable type of crowd for this method. The assumption of the study is that university students are a suitable crowd for this method. To accomplish this, a private university (Istanbul Kemerburgaz University) was selected as the sample and the survey was applied to the students of this university. 500 surveys were distributed, 450 accurate returns were taken back. In the last section of the study, the obtained data was examined and interpreted by the help of the statistical program (SPSS). The variables of the study have been identified as age, gender, class, education type (scholarship/fee required) and academic unit (faculty/vocational school). The limitation of the study is that the survey has been applied to only one university. The data obtained and examined has shown that university students are a suitable crowd for this method and are willing to participate in this method.