Business-Oriented Gig-Economy Landscape
In the freelance world where large enterprises post projects for freelancers to work on there are multiple human cloud platforms. According to recent studies, since 2009 the number of such platforms has grown from 80 to more than 330 globally. The landscape of the platforms compelled us to focus on their variations in two dimensions.
The first dimension has to do with the project complexity, or the complexity of tasks proposed for freelancers – from very simple standalone tasks (also called microtasks) to really complex projects with a diverse set of requirements and the call for high interdependencies among skills required to accomplish the work.
The other dimension involves different formats of freelance workforce: crowd, individual contractor or a team. We realized that platforms like Gigster, Business Talent Group or Professionals 4.0, that focus on complex projects and different team configurations to work on these projects, are studied far less. So we decided to focus on this particular platform type.
The main issue that we wanted to study was: how do teams actually form and function in the context of complex enterprise gig-economy projects? Therefore, we examined 83 different projects recently accomplished on the Professionals 4.0 platform, and narrowed their number to 10 projects that we believed fitting our requirements for in-depth research.