Ideation contests: Crowd management and valorization to avoid negative feelings of participants

Abstract

This study seeks to understand the managerial consequences of involving users in the innovation process and focuses on how to avoid contestants' negative feelings by dealing with increasingly more informed participants in crowdsourcing contests. Using a qualitative approach confronting participants' and managers' perspectives, the findings reveal a gap between how companies intend to manage their relationships with participants, what they actually do, and how this affects participants' feelings. Three sources of negative feelings emerge from the data and must be dealt with: (1) information regarding the future use of contributions and overpromising, (2) sharing intellectual property rights, and (3) prise allocation and selection criteria. As the increasing empowerment of participants requires rethinking the participant–brand relationship in online crowdsourcing, the results provide guidelines for effective relationship building in creative contests by identifying three types of needed recognition from the consumers' side, which refer to three hierarchical levels of participant valorization from the managers' side: basic, contribution and social recognition.

Crowdsourcing: a systematic review of the literature using text mining

“…Innovation enablers in crowdsourcingcrowd competences: A keystone for efficient innovation processes is to attract a big and diverse pool of contributors, as the more the sources, the more and better the concentrated knowledge (Afuah and Tucci, 2012;Allen et al, 2018;Feller et al, 2012;Hanine and Steils, 2019;Steils and Hanine, 2016). High participation can ensure sufficiency of submissions and bring a diversity of skills and backgrounds in order to promote thinking out of the box and the creation of new knowledge (Allen et al, 2018;Feller et al, 2012).…”

Understanding crowdsourcing projects: A review on the key design elements of a crowdsourcing initiative

“…Although the crowdsourcing firm can explicitly determine the extrinsic motivation in form of monetary rewards, the intrinsic motivation is more difficult to assess. However, intrinsic motivation plays a fundamental role, and the crowdsourcer can emphasize certain issues in the task description that relate to intrinsic motivation, such as promising feedback to submitted solutions (Hanine & Steils, 2019). Whereas motivation is one aspect that the crowd considers for participation in crowdsourcing, another aspect is the related costs in terms of time and effort that occur in the solution development.…”

“…Second, crowdsourcing firms must define the factors that determine whether crowdsourcing a specific task ultimately can provide value to the firm. It may be particularly difficult for the crowdsourcer to determine the internal workload associated with conducting a crowdsourcing campaign (Hanine & Steils, 2019). Thus, a first step is to explicitly consider the related internal costs of resources, such as personnel.…”

“…Though crowd motivation as a central factor for crowdsourcing is accounted for in this study, there are more potential advancements that can be made to the suggested morphology. We suggest that it could be interesting to investigate how the crowdsourcer can foster rewards that correspond to the intrinsic motivation of individuals to participate in crowdsourcing, for instance, how crowdsourcers can implement rewards in the design phase of a crowdsourcing contest that relate to the motivation of social recognition as a central intrinsic motivator (Hanine & Steils, 2019). This requires the crowdsourcer to understand the crowd composition and what determines prestige within the crowd communities.…”

“…Similarly, Brabham (2010) identifies four primary motivators for participation in crowdsourcing initiatives: the opportunity to make money, the opportunity to develop one's skills, the opportunity to take up full‐time work and the love of community. Hanine and Steils (2019) state that negative feelings must be avoided, for instance, through transparency and encouraging a positive and respectful climate. In particular, perceived fairness of a crowdsourcing contest increases the likelihood of crowd participation (Mazzola et al, 2020).…”