The following Bachelor’s thesis explores the different uses of crowdsourcing by private organisations and analyses them internally, in terms of strategic capabilities. The purpose of this Bachelor’s thesis is to show the reader the different internal strategic issues resulting from the use of crowdsourcing by private organisations. The authors focused namely on crowd creation, crowdfunding and crowd voting through three private organisations using one of these types respectively in their business processes. The qualitative research was conducted through a multiple case study design and through interviews for the primary data collection. The results from the research varied from case to case. Firstly, the Ricola case has shown that crowd creation can especially have impacts on its physical strategic capabilities. Secondly, La Biscuiterie Jeannette’s case has indicated that crowdfunding strongly impacts its financial strategic capabilities. Thirdly, the case of Schneider has enabled to highlight on the one hand the growing importance of crowd voting and on the other hand that crowd voting had no major impacts on its strategic capabilities, yet. Finally, this research intended to give inspiration to other researchers into the field of crowdsourcing and its three subtypes. Therefore, this thesis can be a basis for further researches in this field.

A large proportion of the farming in Kenya and Eastern Africa is performed by smallholding farmers. At the same time, consumers are expecting to find foodstuff more close by and in a more convenient way than most smallholding farmers can provide. Crowdsourcing can efficiently be applied to many problems where many small producers need to collaborate to create the complete product, without exposing much of the complex process to the end consumers. Using semi structured interviews, systematic literature review and prototyping, the application of crowdsourcing to reach and empower smallholding farmers was explored. The findings were used to create recommendations in the form of guidelines that are expected to serve as ground work and background to future studies within the area. In general, a mobile based platform for crowdsourcing was found to be viable while still having some problems with the intended target market. Three primary factors which affects the potential success were identified; The generally low availability of internet to smallholding farmers (limited by high prices), lacking education which can limit comprehension of more complicated processes, and smartphones with limited capacity for advanced applications. / En stor del av jordbruket i Kenya och östra Afrika utförs av småbönder. Samtidigt förväntar sig konsumenter att kunna hitta matprodukter närmare och på ett mer bekvämt sätt än de flesta småbönder kan erbjuda. Crowdsourcing kan effektivt tillämpas på många problem där flera små producenter behöver samarbeta för att skapa den kompletta produkten utan att utsätta slutkonsumenten för den komplexa processen. Med hjälp av semi-trukturerade intervjuer, systematisk litteratur studie och prototyping, undersöktes tillämpningen av crowdsourcing för att nå och förstärka småbönder. Resultaten användes för att skapa rekommendationer i form av riktlinjer som förväntas fungera som grundarbete och bakgrund till framtida studier inom området. I allmänhet visade sig en mobilbaserad plattform för crowdsourcing vara realistisk, samtidigt som den fortfarande hade några problem med den avsedda målmarknaden. Tre primära faktorer som påverkar den potentiella framgången identifierades. Dessa var den generellt låga tillgängligheten av internet till småbönder (begränsad av höga priser), avsaknad av utbildning som kan begränsa förståelsen av mer komplicerade processer, och smartphones med begränsad kapacitet för avancerade applikationer.