Abstract
Crowd-based ideation contests facilitate solution-seeking firms (seekers) to address their problems by soliciting ideas from external individuals (solvers). In this study, we examine how seekers’ involvement—particularly in terms of the exemplars and prizes that they provide—shape the ideation process and outcomes in such contests. Although seekers’ decisions about the exemplars to show and prizes to offer may be independent from one another, we show that certain aspects of these decisions jointly impact the extent to which solvers adopt seekers’ exemplars in their ideas. This finding demonstrates that individual facets of seeker involvement could intertwine and have intricate effects on solvers right from the initiation of the contests. We further show that, by influencing solvers’ exemplar adoption, seekers can also affect the effectiveness of the ideas. All in all, our results indicate that seekers acquire ideas not just through the crowd but also with the crowd, and they play an active role in how and what solvers ideate. Instead of simply delegating idea generation to solvers, seekers should thus share the onus of ideation and be aware of the impacts of their involvement in contests.
Highlights
With the proliferation of crowd-based ideation contests, solution-seeking firms no longer have to rely solely on internal employees to address their problems; they can call on individuals outside their organizations for solutions
The results indicated that the effect of exemplar quantity on exemplar adoption
We used the entire sample to examine the relationships among contest winning, effort economization, and prize attractiveness in the contest; in the interest of space, we present the key findings of the analyses here and the details in the online appendix
Summary
With the proliferation of crowd-based ideation contests, solution-seeking firms no longer have to rely solely on internal employees to address their problems; they can call on individuals outside their organizations for solutions. These contests are competitions in which seekers engage solvers to develop ideas and solutions to solve creativity- and innovation-related problems (Terwiesch and Xu 2008, Majchrzak and Malhotra 2013).. The crowd could develop product ideas that are more effective in solving the underlying problems than the professionals in a company could generate (Poetz and Schreier 2012), and solvers who lack the domain expertise for specific R&D problems could submit successful solutions (Jeppesen and Lakhani 2010).
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