Constraining Ideas: How Seeing Ideas of Others Harms Creativity in Open Innovation

Abstract

Open innovation contests that display all submitted ideas to participants are a popular way for firms to generate ideas. In such contest-based ideation, the authors show that seeing numerous competitive ideas of others harms, rather than stimulates, creative performance (Study 1). Others’ competitive prior ideas interfere with idea generation, as new ideas need to be differentiated from the preceding ones to be original. Exposure to an increasing number of prior ideas thus heightens individuals’ perceived constraints of expressing ideas and harms creative performance (Studies 2 and 3). Furthermore, creative performance monotonically reduces with an increasing number of prior ideas (Study 4). A final study demonstrates that showing only a limited number of ideas as well as grouping prior ideas offer actionable ways to reduce prior ideas’ harmful influence (Study 5). These results illustrate viable ways to improve contest-based ideation outcomes merely by changing how competitive prior ideas are presented.

The Limits of Open Innovation: A Literature Review and Research Agenda

“…Although exposure to many competing ideas provides a higher chance of securing the best possible idea for successful product development, this exposure also increases the perceived constraints in the mind of the participants during the contest. Idea competition effect can negatively affect individual competitor's perception of the task and thus constrain their ability to ideate [74]. Using social mechanisms and technologies in OI models such as SPD also increases the negative effect of idea competition [75].…”

“…[27], [74], [75] Knowledge Barriers Limitations in recruiting qualified individual actors with adequate industry knowledge and required skills.…”

The effects of exposure to others' ideas and their ratings on online crowdsourcing platforms on the quantity and novelty of subsequently generated ideas

“…It has long been customary for companies to rely on internal professionals to generate ideas for new products or product improvements, but nowadays companies increasingly outsource idea‐generation efforts to the so‐called “crowd” (Bayus, 2013; Brabham, 2013; Hofstetter et al, 2021; Howe, 2008; Leimeister et al, 2009; Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2020; Schemmann et al, 2016; Von Hippel, 2005). This is known as crowdsourcing ideas, with “crowdsourcing” being defined as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call” (Howe, 2006).…”

“…Based on the “creative cognition” and “social comparison” theories, we propose that the type of ideas to which one has been exposed (i.e., common versus novel ideas) and the crowd's ratings of these ideas (i.e., low versus high ratings) will jointly influence subsequent idea generation performance. We thus aim to contribute to the crowdsourcing literature (e.g., Bayus, 2013; Hofstetter et al, 2021; Wang et al, 2018) by demonstrating that subsequent idea generation performance on crowdsourcing online platforms is dependent on both the type and ratings of already posted ideas. Following prior research, we consider the following idea generation performance indicators: (1) the quantity of subsequent ideas, “quantity breeds quality” (Osborn, 1975) and (2) the quality of those ideas in terms of novelty and usefulness.…”

Impact of Social Exclusion on Customer Participation in Innovation: Role of Customer-Company Identification

“…With the rise of open innovation, customer participation in innovation has evolved from individual behaviors to social ones involving interactive communication ( Khan et al, 2019 ; Hofstetter et al, 2021 ). Meanwhile, in recent years, the innovation of consumer electronics products and daily use products have often been associated with socially excluded individuals who have little contact with the real society and shut themselves off in their own worlds ( Su et al, 2017 ).…”