Ideator Expertise and Cocreator Inputs in Crowdsourcing-Based New Product Development

Abstract

Crowdsourcing-based new product development (NPD) involves consumers in both the ideation and product development phases. The success of crowdsourcing-based NPD depends on both the ideators’ expertise and the interplay of their expertise with other cocreators’ inputs due to knowledge integration. Large-scale, longitudinal data from a crowdsourcing-based NPD platform reveal that ideators’ engineering expertise helps convert ideas into final products more than ideators’ marketing expertise. In contrast, ideators’ marketing expertise helps these products achieve more sales than ideators’ engineering expertise. Moreover, final products achieve more sales if ideators’ marketing expertise embedded in initial product ideas is later augmented with either marketing or engineering-related development inputs by crowd cocreators. However, ideas generated by ideators with engineering expertise achieve fewer product sales when those ideas are complemented by more marketing-related development inputs by cocreators. These findings extend crowdsourcing-based NPD theory and furnish insight on managing crowdsourcing-based NPD platforms.