Dark Side or Bright Light: Destructive and Constructive Deviant Content in Consumer Ideation Contests

Abstract

Firms use ideation contests to generate ideas from consumers. This type of collaboration provides access to new knowledge and reveals latent consumer needs. But it also is risky, as firms give up control to an unknown crowd. Some contestants use ideation contests to post content that is unintended and unwanted by contest hosts, a behavior that represents deviant co‐creation. Drawing on literature from sociology and consumer research, deviance is defined as a relative, norm‐violating behavior that has the potential to activate others. We report the results from a netnography study to define the phenomenon of deviant co‐creation in ideation contests. Based on these findings, we provide a theoretical foundation for deviant co‐creation and conceptualize and empirically illustrate various patterns of deviant content, ranging from destructive to constructive. The study reveals that deviant content in ideation contests includes illegitimate as well as legitimate content. Legitimate content includes five themes: humorous, provocative, unique, violation from technical, and social norms. Deviant content usually bewilders evaluators and draws their attention to the content. Destructive deviant content may trigger visible and malicious protests or result in mocking and ridicule on the contest platform and other social media, thereby exposing the contest host to reputational risks. Constructive deviant content can lead to positive discussions in comment sections and other social media outlets, as well as foster further development of an initial idea, thereby contributing to the firm's innovation potential. This article provides managers a deeper understanding of deviant content raising awareness for the dark side risks as well as indicating how to leverage it to achieve constructive co‐creation.

Under the Wide Umbrella of Open Innovation

“…That is, analysis of the various tactics taken to access external knowledge across large numbers of sources consistently shows a point of decreasing returns to innovativeness, yet qualitative research on some mechanisms of open innovation continues to nearly exclusively highlight successful open innovation exemplars without thoroughly dissecting the lessons of failed open innovation (Adamczyk et al, ; Chesbrough, ). As such, there is only limited attention for moderating effects and contingencies with not enough focus thus far on failure, costs and the “dark side” of open innovation (Bogers et al, ; Faems et al, ; Gatzweiler, Blazevic, and Piller, ).…”

How Firms Develop Capabilities for Crowdsourcing to Increase Open Innovation Performance: The Interplay between Organizational Roles and Knowledge Processes

“…This form of crowdsourcing is different from crowdsourcing of less knowledge‐intensive tasks such as idea generation, idea evaluation, or design tasks (Foss et al, ; Poetz and Schreier, ; Pollok et al, ). While ideation contests are often initiated by the marketing department and are isolated from the rest of the organization (Gatzweiler, Blazevic, and Piller, ), crowdsourcing for technology needs is often undertaken as part of regular R&D projects, addressing concrete development tasks. Different to ideation contests, where participants can view and iterate the submissions of other contestants, crowdsourcing for technology needs takes place in closed formats where contestants can neither see each other's solutions nor discuss the task and its criteria among each other (Bockstedt, Druehl, and Mishra, ).…”

Persuasion in Corporate Idea Contests: The Moderating Role of Content Scarcity on Decision‐Making

“…Previous online ideation studies have analyzed various aspects of the decision‐making process that are essential for whether a decision is made intuitively or reflectively. They found essential sources of issue‐irrelevant information, such as personal distance to authors (Reitzig and Sorenson, ), a large pool of idea submissions, referred to as crowding (Piezunka and Dahlander, ), and diverse aspects of community reactions (Gatzweiler, Blazevic, and Piller, ; Magnusson, Wästlund, and Netz, ). Overall, literature shows that issue‐irrelevant aspects may persuade evaluators toward intuitive decisions and can be expressed in different ways through ideas.…”