Firms increasingly use innovation tournaments to crowdsource innovation ideas from customers. This article uncovers antecedents and consequences of customers’ participation intensity over the course ...of a tournament. More specifically, the authors theorize on the effects that the type and timing of moderating feedback have on tournament participants’ participation intensity, as well as the effect of the latter on idea quality. Through two longitudinal experiments using a commercial innovation tournament platform, the authors show that moderating feedback stimulates ideators’ participation intensity. They find that negative feedback increases participation intensity, as compared to no feedback and positive feedback. Moreover, negative feedback, either provided in isolation or together with positive feedback, is more effective during the early stages than in the later stages of a tournament. Using a large-scale managerial survey, the authors show that higher participation intensity leads to higher idea quality and better business performance. The effect of participation intensity on idea quality is stronger than the effect of number of ideas and as strong as the effect of number of participants on idea quality.
With the growing complexity of social and environmental issues, there has been a blossoming of hackathons and open innovation challenges. This push to accelerate innovation embraces a perspective of ...time as clock time—conceived as objective, linear, measurable, and therefore, rather easy to compress. Such a view of time conflicts with the emergent nature of idea generation and the indeterminate process that leads to social impact, which both rely on event time. Drawing on a 40-month ethnographic study of OpenIDEO, an open social innovation platform, I examine how, in designing open innovation challenges, the OpenIDEO team interwove clock time and event time in order to foster idea generation and support social impact. Through inductive analysis, I identify three practices—mapping, stretching, and squeezing time—enacted by the OpenIDEO team to “make time” and thus, continuously engage participants and sponsors in the challenges as well as to allow participants to implement their ideas. My findings demonstrate how organizations can intentionally use time to nurture collaborative innovation and yield sustainable social impact. My study questions the traditional interpretation of clock time as the foundation of all temporalities as it shows how temporal work can be grounded within event time.
Funding:
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation NSF VOSS Grant 1122381.
Interest has burgeoned, in recent years, in how social networks influence individual creativity and innovation. From both the theoretical and empirical points of view, this increased attention has ...generated many inconsistencies. In this article we propose that a conceptualization of the idea journey encompassing phases that the literature has so far overlooked can help solve existing tensions. We conceptualize four phases of the journey of an idea, from conception to completion: idea generation, idea elaboration, idea championing, and idea implementation. We propose that a creator has distinct primary needs in each phase: cognitive flexibility, support, influence, and shared vision, respectively. Individual creators successfully move through a phase when the relational and structural elements of their networks match the distinct needs of the phase. The relational and structural elements that are beneficial for one phase, however, are detrimental for another. We propose that in order to solve this seeming contradiction and the associated paradoxes, individual creators have to change interpretations and frames throughout the different phases. This, in turn, allows them to activate different network characteristics at the appropriate moment and successfully complete the idea journey from novel concept to a tangible outcome that changes the field.
Membership change has been found to stimulate collective idea generation but to not always benefit group creativity—the generation of final outcomes that are novel and useful. Based on motivated ...information processing theory, we propose that membership change challenges group members to generate more ideas, but that this only contributes to group creativity when members have high levels of prosocial motivation and are willing to process and integrate each other’s ideas. In a laboratory study of 56 student groups, we found that incremental, but not radical, idea generation mediated the positive effect of membership change on group creativity, and only when group members were prosocially motivated. The present study points to different roles of incremental versus radical ideas and underscores the importance of accounting for prosocial motivation in groups for reaping the benefits of membership change in relation to group creativity.
The link between organizational structure and innovation has been a longstanding interest of organizational scholars, yet the exact nature of the relationship has not been clearly established. ...Drawing on the behavioral theory of the firm, we take a process view and examine how hierarchy of authority—a fundamental element of organizational structure reflecting degree of managerial oversight—differentially influences behavior and performance in the idea generation versus idea selection phases of the innovation process. Using a multimethod approach that includes a field study and a lab experiment, we find that hierarchy of authority is detrimental to the idea generation phase of innovation, but that hierarchy can be beneficial during the screening or selection phase of innovation. We also identify a behavioral mechanism underlying the effect of hierarchy of authority on selection performance and propose that selection is a critical organizational capability that can be strategically developed and managed through organizational design. Our investigation helps clarify the theoretical relationship between structure and innovation performance and demonstrates the behavioral and economic consequences of organizational design choice.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1142
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The authors explore how firms can enhance consumer performance in online idea generation platforms. Most, if not all, online idea generation platforms offer all consumers identical tasks in which (1) ...participants are granted access to ideas from other participants and (2) ideas are classified into categories, but consumers can navigate freely across idea categories. The former is linked to stimulus ideas, and the latter may be viewed as a first step toward problem decomposition. The authors propose that the effects of both stimulus ideas and problem decomposition are moderated by consumers' domain-specific knowledge. In particular, concrete cues such as stimulus ideas are more beneficial to low-knowledge consumers, and high-knowledge consumers are better served with abstract cues such as the ones offered by problem decomposition. The authors' hypotheses are supported by an extensive empirical investigation involving more than 6,000 participants. The findings suggest that online idea generation platforms should use problem decomposition more explicitly and that firms should not immediately show other participants' ideas to high-knowledge consumers when they access the platform. In other words, online idea generation platforms should customize the task structure on the basis of each participant's domain-specific knowledge.
Considering creativity as a journey beyond idea generation, scholars have theorized that different ties are beneficial in different phases. As individuals usually possess different types of ties, ...selecting the optimal ties in each phase and changing ties as needed are central activities for creative success. We identify the types of ties (weak or strong) that are helpful in idea generation and idea elaboration and, given this understanding, whether individuals activate ties in each phase accordingly. In an experimental study of individuals conversing with their ties, we provide evidence of the causal effects of weak and strong ties on idea generation and idea elaboration. We also find that individuals do not always activate ties optimally and identify network size and risk as barriers. Our results in a series of studies reveal that individuals with large networks, despite providing more opportunity to activate both strong and weak ties, activate fewer weak ties and are less likely to switch ties across phases than individuals with smaller networks, particularly when creativity is perceived as a high-risk endeavor. Finally, we find that activating the wrong ties leads to either dropping creative ideas or pursuing uncreative ones.
•Examples play an important role in the crowdsourcing of creative ideas.•Examples of good and bad ideas impact crowd ideation differently.•Examples of good ideas are helpful to a point for crowds ...submitting ideas.•Sharing more bad idea examples is related to more ideas being submitted by crowds.
Crowdsourcing as a mechanism of open innovation is a popular way for organizations to solicit ideas from external agents. Our research focuses on the relationship between examples in problem statements provided to a crowd and the subsequent number of ideas submitted by the crowd. We investigate the quantity, as well as the diversity, of these examples. Using generalized regression to analyze data from 122 problem briefs posed to a crowd on an intermediary platform between 2018 and 2021, we find that the relationship between the number of examples given to a crowd and the number of ideas received from the crowd is an inverted U-shaped one. Further, we find that providing a diverse set of good and bad idea examples increases the number of new ideas received from a crowd. Our research extends the nascent crowdsourcing research on using problem statements to guide the crowd’s response to innovation problems.
This research identifies a surprising downside to using crowdsourcing to generate new product ideas: participants who do not win an idea generation contest temporarily disengage from the ...contest-hosting brand. When people lose a crowdsourcing contest, the experience of losing negatively affects the participants’ word-of-mouth and short-term purchase behaviors. Reframing the contest as a community activity (e.g., “Join the crowd and help us find a name for our new restaurant”) rather than a competition (e.g., “Compete with the crowd to be the one who names our new restaurant”) is found to positively affect a losing customer's subsequent engagement with the contest-hosting brand. Community framing shifts attention away from losing the contest (i.e., it reduces negative affect) and toward collectively creating a superior outcome (i.e., it increases one's perceived contribution), without changing the nature of the contest itself (i.e., participants continue to submit ideas). Community framing positively affects subsequent participant engagement, but it does not influence the effort the participant invests in the contest or the quality of the idea the participant submits. The evidence consists of lab experiments, field experiments, and a large-scale field study that measured actual purchase behavior.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to assess the effects of two types of trust (vertical and horizontal trust) on knowledge sharing (knowledge donating and knowledge collecting) and the impact of ...knowledge sharing on innovative work behavior (idea generation and idea realization). The study also explores the mediating role of knowledge sharing.
Design/methodology/approach
Partial least squares path modeling and data collected from 252 participants at one large Polish capital group were used to test the research hypotheses.
Findings
The results showed that both vertical trust and horizontal trust are positively related to knowledge donating and knowledge collecting. Contrary to knowledge collecting, knowledge donating is significantly related to idea generation, which is highly correlated with idea realization. There is no direct relation between knowledge sharing behavior and idea realization. Knowledge donating mediates the relationship between vertical trust and idea generation.
Research limitations/implications
Self-reports and the cross-sectional nature of the data collection are the main limitations of this study.
Practical implications
The results allow managers to better understand what factors and processes contribute to greater employee innovativeness.
Originality/value
To the best of the author's knowledge, the study is the first to examine the relationships among vertical trust, horizontal trust, knowledge donating, knowledge collecting, idea generation and idea realization in an integrated way. This paper answered the questions (1) which type of trust is more important for knowledge sharing, and (2) which type of knowledge sharing behavior is more important for innovative work behavior. This paper investigated whether differences in the strength of relationships between constructs are significant.
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