Crowd equals diversity? a diversity analysis on participation of agency-sponsored open innovation challenges

Recent events in the US and beyond have stirred societal debates on how to measure and increase diversity in fields such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). In the past decade, many US public agencies with STEM missions have explored crowd-sourced, open innovation challenges as a potential solution. To probe whether and how diversity has been achieved in this context, this thesis addresses three goals: (i) understanding the multi-faceted nature of diversity and its determinants based on literature review across disciplines, (ii) testing whether open innovation challenges achieve the policy objective of increasing diversity in solvers for public agencies, and (iii) investigating whether increased diversity leads to desired innovation outcomes. This thesis leverages the NASA-Freelancer Astrobee Challenge Series (ACS), an online robotics design prize competition, as a case study.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Zhang, Lihui(Lihui Lydia)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Zoe Szajnfarber and Dava J. Newman.

• Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.
• Technology and Policy Program.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130795

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/130795