Gigonomy in priority industries and fields of the economy: demand for freelancers and crowdsourcers

Abstract

Remote forms of employment are beginning to play an increasingly important role in the context of systemic digital transformation of industries and sectors of the economy, including the growing importance of platform solutions. Therefore, gigonomics as temporary employment is of particular interest in the development of modern organizations. The purpose of the study is to assess the level of industrial use of gig-workers, identify the least popular areas of their work and propose a mechanism to expand the areas of activity and increase the work of freelancers’ and crowdsourcers’ demand. The work uses desk research methods to study the state of the gigonomics in the world and in Russia, collect statistical data on the number of implemented crowdsourcing projects on 27 Russian platforms and distribute them by industry segments. A comparative analysis of the use of gig-workers in various industries and sectors of the Russian economy was carried out, and based on the modeling method, the development of a national network of e-platforms based on Russian universities was proposed in order to coordinate the joint work of business and science to solve industry problems facing modern organizations. The study identified sectors of the economy with the lowest rates of gig-worker use, including healthcare, transportation, hotel business and tourism, consumer goods and manufacturing. At the same time, the most popular areas include the financial sector, IT, marketing, design, heavy industry and insurance. It was also possible to classify domestic crowd-platforms into three groups: public, private/ commercial and corporate. The sectoral specificity of the tasks, the low level of availability and shortage of highly specialized personnel, the lack of effective mechanisms for searching and selecting personnel are the main reasons for the low growth rates of the listed economic sectors. The proposed model of a national network of e-platforms will reduce the time spent searching for specialists to solve labor-intensive business problems, integrating representatives of the scientific community into the processes of enterprises industrial functioning.

Keywords

• gigonomics
• crowdsourcing
• freelancing
• gig-worker
• electronic platform
• industrial economic development