Rate or Trade? Identifying Winning Ideas in Open Idea Sourcing

Abstract

I nformation technology (IT) has created new patterns of digitally-mediated collaboration that allow opensourcing of ideas for new products and services. These novel sociotechnical arrangements afford finely-grained manipulation of how tasks can be represented and have changed the way organizations ideate. In this paper, we investigate differences in behavioral decision-making resulting from IT-based support of open idea evaluation. We report results from a randomized experiment of 120 participants comparing IT-based decision-making support using a rating scale (representing a judgment task) and a preference market (representing a choice task). We find that the rating scale-based task invokes significantly higher perceived ease of use than the preference market-based task and that perceived ease of use mediates the effect of the task representation treatment on the users' decision quality. Furthermore, we find that the understandability of ideas being evaluated, which we assess through the ideas' readability, and the perception of the task's variability moderate the strength of this mediation effect, which becomes stronger with increasing perceived task variability and decreasing understandability of the ideas. We contribute to the literature by explaining how perceptual differences of task representations for open idea evaluation affect the decision quality of users and translate into differences in mechanism accuracy. These results enhance our understanding of how crowdsourcing as a novel mode of value creation may effectively complement traditional work structures.

Special Section Introduction—Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows

“…OCs are the scene of wide-ranging efforts in knowledge creation, extending into product, service or process innovation (Blohm et al 2016, Haefliger et al 2011, Holmström and Henfridsson 2006. They are increasingly seen as sites for unconventional knowledge collaboration and innovation , Majchrzak and Malhotra 2016, Yan and Tan 2014.…”

Crowdsourced idea generation: The effect of exposure to an original idea

“…In the idea exposure experiment, the second batch of 353 ideas was collected when the participants were exposed to one of the stimulus ideas. It is not uncommon to use crowd members to evaluate crowd-generated ideas (Blohm, Riedl, Füller, & Leimeister, 2016;Chiu, Liang, & Turban, 2014; Velamuri, Schneckenberg, Haller, & Moeslein, 2017). From these 120 ideas, we needed to identify two groups of stimulus ideas: one group being original, another being unoriginal.…”

“…Effectiveness is defined as the degree to which an idea is feasible and promotes public transport (Dean et al, 2006). It is not uncommon to use crowd members to evaluate crowd-generated ideas (Blohm, Riedl, Füller, & Leimeister, 2016;Chiu, Liang, & Turban, 2014; Velamuri, Schneckenberg, Haller, & Moeslein, 2017). The purpose of an advertisement is to have an impact on its audience.…”

Avaliação De Ideias Em Iniciativas Crowdsourcing Para Inovação: Um Estudo Exploratório

“…O processo de avaliação sistemática de ideias em sua fase inicial é de suma importância para as organizações (BLOHM et al, 2016) e o sucesso da implementação de um projeto é bastante influenciado pelo processo de avaliação das ideias.…”