The Value of Crowdsourcing: Can Users Really Compete with Professionals in Generating New Product Ideas?

Abstract

Generating ideas for new products used to be the exclusive domain of marketers, engineers, and/or designers. Users have only recently been recognized as an alternative source of new product ideas. Whereas some have attributed great potential to outsourcing idea generation to the "crowd" of users ("crowdsourcing"), others have clearly been more skeptical. The authors join this debate by presenting a real-world comparison of ideas actually generated by a firm's professionals with those generated by users in the course of an idea generation contest. Both professionals and users provided ideas to solve an effective and relevant problem in the consumer goods market for baby products. Executives from the underlying company evaluated all ideas (blind to their source) in terms of key quality dimensions including novelty, customer benefit, and feasibility. The study reveals that the crowdsourcing process generated user ideas that score significantly higher in terms of novelty and customer benefit, and somewhat lower in terms of feasibility. However, the average values for feasibility-in sharp contrast to novelty and customer benefit-tended to be relatively high overall, meaning that feasibility did not constitute a narrow bottleneck in this study. Even more interestingly, it is found that user ideas are placed more frequently than expected among the very best in terms of novelty and customer benefit. These findings, which are quite counterintuitive from the perspective of classic new product development (NPD) literature, suggest that, at least under certain conditions, crowdsourcing might constitute a promising method to gather user ideas that can complement those of a firm's professionals at the idea generation stage in NPD.

Crowd-powered positive psychological interventions

“…For those whose signature strengths include 'Love of Learning,' for example, crowds could help users find ways to pursue new pathways to knowledge (such as providing links to interesting online courses, blogs, or adult education classes). Previous work in humancomputer interaction has outlined ways to successfully crowdsource idea generation in domains as diverse as product ideation (Poetz & Schreier, 2012), poetry translation (Kittur, 2010), and furniture design (Yu & Nickerson, 2011). Crowds could similarly produce useful ideas for strengths use that may not have occurred to the user.…”

Sustainable Design Futures: An open design vision for the circular economy in fashion and textiles

“…Getting 'closer' to the production of an artefact and producing something on demand can respond to local conditions in a way that a closed design cannot. Research suggests that a diverse population of contributors can be more capable than a few experts and open input to the design process from a variety of backgrounds might offer a perspective on an issue that other wise might be missed (Poetz and Schreier, 2012). In their work Aitamurto et al (2015) articulate OD as a contingent process that provides public access to both the design object and the means to add to the design object, thus opening the process.…”

Combining Ideas in Crowdsourced Idea Generation

“…Collecting ideas through crowdsourcing has become a common practice in open innovation (Bayus, 2013;Howe, 2006;Poetz and Schreier, 2012). Crowdsourcing can be defined as outsourcing tasks to an undefined, large group of people through an open call (Howe, 2006).…”

“…When a crowd has the knowledge and motivation, this crowdsourcing approach improves the chance of developing effective solutions to a company's problems (Afuah and Tucci, 2012;Poetz and Schreier, 2012). In many crowdsourced tasks, people work as individuals and compete with each other for a prize (Ebner, et al, 2009;Leimeister, et al, 2009).…”

“…There are many empirical studies showing the benefits of crowdsourcing innovation, such as generating better product ideas than internal personnel (Poetz and Schreier, 2012;Schweitzer, et al, 2012), increasing the number of new products (Laursen, 2011), and resulting in revenue from new products (Lilien, et al, 2002;Nishikawa, et al, 2013 (Majchrzak and Malhotra, 2013), crowdsourcing projects are rarely designed to facilitate idea combination, a common approach to promote creativity. Even though some crowdsourcing websites allow people to see and comment on peers' ideas, these websites usually don't guide people to combine ideas.…”