Jack of All, Master of Some: Information Network and Innovation in Crowdsourcing Communities

Abstract

In this paper, we examine information flow across two crowdsourcing communities and provide empirical evidence on how information obtained from a customer support crowdsourcing community can help individuals generate more novel, popular, and feasible ideas in an innovation crowdsourcing community. Our findings inform firms’ decisions about whether to simultaneously host customer support and innovation crowdsourcing communities. Companies such as Dell and BestBuy simultaneously host customer support and innovation crowdsourcing communities. Yet many other companies host only innovation crowdsourcing communities. Our findings suggest that hosting both communities has benefits because a customer support community offers idea generators an opportunity to accumulate current needs information as well as to activate means information from their memory. This needs-and-means information enables idea generators to create high-quality new product/service ideas. Our findings further suggest that those firms that are already hosting two crowdsourcing communities could benefit by tracing individuals’ activities more closely. By collecting data about individuals’ microlevel activities in a customer support community, companies would be able to identify those individuals who have a higher probability of creating better ideas. By mobilizing those individuals, companies can increase the quality of ideas they obtain from innovation crowdsourcing communities.