Abstract: Crowd innovation space, as an important carrier of “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation”, is facing the dilemma of survival and development, so how to make a breakthrough is well worth a deep exploration. The existing studies focus on the perspectives of social network theory and dynamic capability theory, ignoring the micro basis of the strategic actions of crowd innovation space. Based on the perspective of attention-based view, this study uses the grounded theory approach to reveal the generation mechanism of the strategic actions of crowd innovation space. The core of the framework is “trait attention-explanation-action-ability generation”. The findings of the study are as follows. (1) Attention to different environmental factors will promote two kinds of attention orientations: entrepreneurial environment orientation and technical industry orientation. (2) The two kinds of attention orientations influence the strategic actions of crowd innovation space organizations through different cross-layer action construction processes. (3) Platform-based organization strategy promotes the resource integration ability and network breadth advantage while professional organization strategy promotes the resource extension ability and network depth advantage of crowd innovation space. This study explores the micro basis and mechanism of the strategic actions of crowd innovation space, which has an important enlightenment and theoretical guidance for crowd innovation space to break through its development dilemma.

Key words: crowd innovation space, attention-based view, attention distribution, strategic actions