Collective intelligence and co-dependent organization: the role of chartered accountants in crowdlending

Résumé En

What role can chartered accountants (CAs) play in the use of collective intelligence in crowdlending and under what conditions? This article studies a failed attempt to use chartered accountants to exploit collective intelligence in a partnership between a crowdlending platform and the professional body for chartered accountants in France. Our results describe some of the actions used by CAs to activate various collective intelligence functions on the forums, both upstream and downstream of collection campaigns. We also reveal two organizational factors that explain the failure to exploit this resource, namely non-compliance with the co-dependence principle and organizational hypocrisy. Based on this analysis, we propose an extended co-dependence model between the platform, project owners, crowd, and chartered accountants, enabling an "engineering" of collective intelligence, i.e. its expression, transformation and exploitation.