Several organizations have developed ongoing crowdsourcing communities that repeatedly collect ideas for new products and services from a large, dispersed "crowd" of nonexperts (consumers) over time. ...Despite its promises, little is known about the nature of an individual's ideation efforts in such an online community. Studying Dell's IdeaStorm community, serial ideators are found to be more likely than consumers with only one idea to generate an idea the organization finds valuable enough to implement, but they are unlikely to repeat their early success once their ideas are implemented. As ideators with past success attempt to again come up with ideas that will excite the organization, they instead end up proposing ideas similar to their ideas that were already implemented (i.e., they generate less diverse ideas). The negative effects of past success are somewhat mitigated for ideators with diverse commenting activity on others' ideas. These findings highlight some of the challenges in maintaining an ongoing supply of quality ideas from the crowd over time.
This paper was accepted by Kamalini Ramdas, entrepreneurship and innovation.
In this study, we consider the dynamics of crowdfunding project support over time. We propose that people support crowdfunding projects financially when they believe that their contribution will make ...an impact. Because perceptions of impact are positively related to goal proximity, we predict that support for a crowdfunding project will increase as the project funding approaches its target goal. In addition, because motivation decreases after a goal is attained, we further predict that crowdfunding contributions will significantly decrease after the target goal is reached. We find strong support for these hypotheses from a large-scale field study involving Kickstarter. Furthermore, we show that several factors related to the expected impact moderate the effects of goal proximity; that is, the positive effect of goal proximity on project support is accentuated if the project is nearing its funding deadline, if the target goal is relatively small, or if the project has limited early support.
•People want to help others if they believe that their contribution really matters.•Crowdfunding support increases as a project approaches its target goal.•Crowdfunding support decreases once the target goal is reached.•There are several moderators of this goal gradient effect.
A few open source software (OSS) products exhibit an abrupt and significant increase in downloads. However, the majority of OSS products fail to gain much interest. Identifying early success is ...important for catalyzing growth in OSS markets. However, previous OSS research has not examined early product success dynamics and assumes adoption to be a continuous process. We propose OSS takeoff in adoptions as a measure of eventual product success. Takeoff is a nonlinear inflection point separating the early development from the growth phase in the product lifecycle. Using arguments from the signaling literature, we propose that community activities send signals about product quality and reduce information asymmetry faced by potential adopters of OSS products. Estimating a Cox proportional hazard model using a large sample of OSS products from SourceForge, we find that takeoff times are significantly associated with signals of quality deficiency and improvement. Further, we find that target audience and product innovativeness moderate this relationship.
Studying the U.S. personal computer industry from its inception in 1974 through 1994, we address the following questions. What product technology strategies increase the survival chances of entrants ...into new, technologically dynamic industries? Does the effectiveness of these strategies differ by pre-entry experience? Does the effectiveness of these strategies differ by when firms enter a new industry? Consistent with the published literature, we find that diversifying entrants have an initial survival advantage over entrepreneurial startups. But, we find the reverse for later entrants: startups that enter later in the industry have a survival advantage over the later entering diversifying entrants. We explain this finding in terms of the firms' product technology strategies (i.e., offering products based on the technology standard and products incorporating the latest technology), pre-entry experience, and entry timing. Our findings highlight that it is crucial to study what firms do after they enter a new industry to more completely understand their ultimate performance.
Building on the resource-based view of the firm, we advance the idea that a firm's customer network can be a strategic asset. We suggest that network effects are a function of network size (i.e., ...installed customer base) and network strength (i.e., the marginal impact of a unit increase in network size on demand). We empirically study these network effects in the 16-bit home video game industry in which the dominant competitiors were Nintendo and Sega. In the spirit of the new empirical IO framework, we estimate a structural econometric model assuming the data are equilibrium outcomes of the best fitting noncooperative game in price and advertising. After controlling for other effects, we find strong evidence that network effects are asymmetric between the competitors in the home video game industry. Specifically, we find that the firm with a smaller customer network (Nintendo) has higher network strength than the firm with the larger customer base (Sega). Thus, our results provide a possible explanation for this situation in which the firm with a smaller customer network (Nintendo) was able to overtake the sales of a firm with a larger network size (Sega).
Long‐standing wisdom holds that building on ideas is beneficial for group creativity. We empirically verify this recommended practice. We analyse creativity sessions of nine groups of professionals ...tasked to synthesize new ideas into one final creative concept. Linkography and quantitative analysis are used for analysing the impact of building on ideas on group creativity. First, the results indicate that building on ideas does not lead to more novel, feasible, or useful ideas. Second, our study shows that building on ideas is beneficial only if the ideators build upon the “right” ideas. Ideators generate more novel ideas only when they build on novel ideas. Moreover, our research reveals a trade‐off: Building on novel ideas leads to more novel but less feasible ideas while building on familiar ideas leads to less novel but more feasible ideas. Finally, we find that stimulus ideas (i.e., ideas that are built upon) are more likely to be selected and integrated into the final concept. Taken together, our results indicate that building on novel ideas enhances the generation and selection processes. Implications for theory and research on creativity in organizations are discussed.
In contrast to the prevailing supplyside explanation that price decreases are the key driver of a sales takeoff, we argue that outward shifting supply and demand curves lead to market takeoff. Our ...fundamental idea is that sales in new markets are initially low because the first commercialized forms of new innovations are primitive. Then, as new firms enter, actual and perceived product quality improves (and prices possibly drop), which leads to a takeoff in sales. To provide empirical evidence for this explanation, we explore the relationship between takeoff times, price decreases, and firm entry for a sample of consumer and industrial product innovations commercialized in the United States over the past 150 years. Based on a proportional hazards analysis of takeoff times, we find that new firm entry dominates other factors in explaining observed sales takeoff times. We interpret these results as supporting the idea that demand shifts during the early evolution of a new market due to nonprice factors is the key driver of a sales takeoff.
The existing literature offers conflicting advice regarding the types of task instructions that increase the quality of ideas during idea generation. Our research examines three types of task ...instructions: unbounded (participants are asked to generate any ideas they want), suggestive (participants are asked to propose ideas that improve current product benefits), and prohibitive (participants are asked to propose ideas that do not involve current product benefits). We explore the effectiveness of these three types of task instructions in a field study involving 6406 ideas from eYeka, a global crowdsourcing platform. As compared to unbounded task instructions, we find that suggestive task instructions are significantly related to lower idea originality, feasibility, and value. In addition, we find that idea originality and value are statistically equivalent for unbounded and prohibitive task instructions. Together, our results suggest that either unbounded or prohibitive task instructions should be used when crowdsourcing innovative ideas.
•The type of task instructions influences the quality of ideas in crowdsourcing.•Our empirical study tests three types of tasks: unbounded, suggestive, and prohibitive.•Unbounded and prohibitive tasks produce the most original and valuable ideas.•Unbounded tasks produce the most feasible ideas.•Suggestive tasks reduce the quality of ideas in crowdsourcing.
The relationships between innate consumer innovativeness, personal characteristics, and new-product adoption behavior is explored. To do this, cross-sectional data from a household panel using a ...structural equation modeling approach is analyzed. The study tests for potential moderating effects using a 2-stage least square estimation procedure. It was found that the personal characteristics of age and income are stronger predictors of new-product ownership in the consumer electronics category than innate consumer innovativeness as a generalized personality trait. It was found that personal characteristics neither influence innate consumer innovativeness nor moderate the relationship between innate consumer innovativeness and new-product adoption behavior.
Based on data from firms in the personal computer industry, we study the effect of new product introductions on three key drivers of firm value: profit rate, profit-rate persistence, and firm size as ...reflected in asset growth. Consistent with our theoretical development, we find that new product introductions influence profit rate and size; however, we find no effect on profit-rate persistence. Interestingly, we also find that the effect of new product introductions on profit rate stems from a reduction in selling and general administrative expenditure intensity rather than through an increase in gross operating return. Notably, firms decrease their advertising intensity in the wake of a new product introduction. Firm profitability in this industry apparently benefits from new product introductions because new products need less marketing support than older products.
