Better together-Harnessing motivations for energy utility crowdsourcing activities

Energy utility firms operate under varying mandates throughout most of the world and typically must operate reliably with long planning cycles and requirements to meet bureaucratic scrutiny and regulatory toll gating to achieve both discrete plan approvals as well as their ongoing licenses to operate. One vehicle for gaining external insights and involving the stakeholders is crowdsourcing. Energy utility firms have a set of distinguishing characteristics (i.e. regulatory processes and stakeholder groups) that they must consider when implementing crowdsourcing activities to aid their planning and innovation strategies. To achieve constructive participation requires understanding and engaging the motivations of the population from which a firm wishes to draw input. We assert that customers' interest, facilitated by digital age communication channels, can provide utility operators with an accessible, valuable resource to assist a wide range of planning and innovation activities. We use the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) lens, grounded by a set of in-depth interviews with utility industry professionals, to articulate motivations for members of the external customer community to provide value to the firms through crowdsourcing activities. We develop five propositions that collectively identify how energy firms should use SDT elements to design crowdsourcing activities.