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

Abstract

Organizations increasingly use corporate online ideation platforms to foster individual innovativeness. Recent research, however, has shown the downside of such contests—the selection of ideas is not entirely rational. Analyzing the impact of content scarcity, which occurs when ideators provide very little issue‐relevant information when submitting ideas, contributes to this new literature stream. The main argument is that evaluators increasingly rely on heuristics based on issue‐irrelevant information when content scarcity obstructs reflective decision‐making. The default‐interventionist model of decision‐making in combination with the Yale attitude change approach allows us to examine the mechanisms evaluators apply when content scarcity occurs. The hypotheses are tested on an extensive data set of 3025 ideas. The results show that content scarcity affects the evaluators' decision‐making process by preventing them from intervening their first intuitive decision. The scarcer the content of the submitted idea, the stronger the persuasiveness of issue‐irrelevant aspects that affect idea selection: aspects of the ideator, message, and community.

Which effort pays off? Analyzing ideators’ behavioral patterns on corporate ideation platforms

“…In a conceptual study, Perry‐Smith and Mannucci (2017) proposed a slightly different systematization and divided the idea journey into the four phases idea generation, elaboration, championing, and implementation. However, in an ideation contest, ideators’ innovative behavior culminates in the evaluators’ decision to select the idea for implementation (Kruft et al, 2019). Thus, this study focuses on the three first phases of Perry‐Smith and Mannucci’s (2017) systematization.…”

“…Second, we contribute to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that ideators can use to increase their effectiveness in ideation contests by empirically examining the relationships between these types of innovation behavior and different success dimensions (Beretta, 2019; Bockstedt et al, 2016; Chen & Liu, 2012; Kruft et al, 2019).…”

The Relationship Between Persuasion Cues and Idea Adoption in Virtual Crowdsourcing Communities

“…Therefore, VCCs can generally be used to strengthen the connectedness between products and their customers, as well as between customers themselves (Yan et al, 2018). Although VCCs are not necessarily created with collaborative innovation in mind, collaborative innovation can emerge and develop naturally during the course of community activities through sharing consumer experiences, addressing product-related problems, proposing solutions to potential difficulties, facilitating learning or teaching product use, and sharing or evaluating new ideas (Kruft, Tilsner, Schindler, & Kock, 2019).…”

“…In practice, crowd members are more likely to be influenced by the behavior of other members as they interact with ideas, share experiences, and formulate opinions (Haas, Criscuolo, & George, 2015;Yang & Han, 2019). While such collaboration activities are frequently discussed in the literature, their persuasive influence on idea adoption in VCCs has not been sufficiently empirically studied (Kruft et al, 2019).…”

Opportunity‐led ideation: How to convert corporate opportunities into innovative ideas

“…Traditionally, non‐digital tools have long since been complemented by digital ones fostering virtual idea generation (Schweitzer et al, 2012). For instance, corporate online ideation platforms (Kruft et al, 2019), innovation communities (Muhdi et al, 2011), competitions and crowdsourcing (Schweitzer et al, 2012) facilitate idea generation.…”