Lower Connectivity is Better: The Effects of Network Structure on Redundancy of Ideas and Customer Innovativeness in Interdependent Ideation Tasks

Abstract

This paper examines the popular marketing practice of interdependent ideation where firms solicit ideas from customers through online platforms that allow for customers to be exposed to or "inspired" by other customers' ideas when generating their own. Although being exposed to others' ideas means that customers are "connected" (at least implicitly) in a communication network that facilities flows of ideas, the effect of network structure or interconnectivity on individual innovativeness has not been considered in this context. The authors examine how, when, and why network structure, specifically the clustering or interconnectivity of one's "inspirations" (other customers), affects the innovativeness of individual customers' product/service ideas in ideation tasks. Across five experiments it is shown that (i) higher clustering/interconnectivity negatively affects the innovativeness of an individual's ideas, (ii) this occurs because idea inspirations are more likely to be similar or redundant when the sources of those inspirations (i.e., other customers to which one is connected) are clustered, (iii) higher redundancy among idea used as inspirations is what causes lower innovativeness, and (iv) this effect is attenuated when customers do not rely on other customers' ideas for inspiration. 11 since much of the brainstorming research is within the social psychology paradigm, this literature also provides some potential mechanisms for how ideating within groups can influence individual and group outcomes (e.g., the literature on production blocking, which helps explain why brainstorming groups sometimes underperform; Lamm and Trommsdorff 2006). However, brainstorming findings have only limited applicability to the current research. This is because communication network structure is not considered in brainstorming and therefore has never been tested. In a brainstorming setting, people are in groups of a certain sizes. From a communication network perspective, everyone is "connected" to everyone else in such groups, and thus there is zero variation in how people are interconnected (i.e., a brainstorming group, if represented as a network, will be always be fully connected). Another point of difference between brainstorming and the current research is that often the outcome in brainstorming is at

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