Long-range planning for purposes of deciding on the development of high investment and long development cycle activities requires that assumptions be made about environmental factors at the time of their future completion. For organizations that serve a market, the future market factors related to supply, demand, and technological developments are at once fundamentally critical and unknowable  with certainty. As long-range planning is required, the optimal strategy is to engage best practices of marketing intelligence foresight. Oftentimes, quantitative analytics of historical data can provide forecasts of future variable values but on the longer time scales of decades, the assumptions that these formulae are based upon become increasingly uncertain. It is therefore necessary to integrate any reasonably accessible insights related to the potential future market factors when responsibly developing long-range plans. While organizations might be expected to have astute insight within their boundaries, valuable insight also exists in the knowledge and reasoning of entities outside of the firm. By appropriately engaging motivational theory in the design of information collecting activities, optimal value from these external sources of insight can be captured for inclusion in long range planning.

This body of research centers on the motivation types within Self-Determination Theory (SDT) as they are operationalized by two groupings of insight seeking activities: crowdsourcing and the Delphi technique.

In the form of an answer to the core research question of “How do organizations seek to maximize the value of marketing intelligence foresight tools that call upon external participation?”, this thesis uses the results and output of five research papers to answer four sub-questions. RQ1: How can organizations apply Self Determination Theory to optimize the value gained from crowdsourcing activities? RQ2: Where have academic researchers applied the Delphi Technique to date, and what longitudinal trends are evident? RQ3: To what degree does the use of crowdsourcing present a potential vulnerability vector for deleterious or malicious intent? RQ4: What motivating factors do expert panelists in a formal Delphi study cite as their reasons for constructively participating? By integrating these factors, this thesis builds a map that directly connects the activities and designs that are reasoned through the lens of SDT to be optimally engage productive motivation, through to a set of insight types that organizations may seek. The linkages take the form of four sets which then subdivide into18 formal propositions of direct linkages between: i) crowdsourcing forms and SDT motivational types, ii) crowdsourcing linked motivational types and accessible insight forms, iii) Delphi expert participation reason themes and SDT motivational types, iv) Delphi linked motivational types and accessible insight forms.