Adopting Seekers’ Solution Exemplars in Crowdsourcing Ideation Contests: Antecedents and Consequences

Crowd-based ideation contests facilitate solution-seeking firms (seekers) to address their problems by soliciting ideas from external individuals (solvers). In this study, we examine how seekers’ involvement—particularly in terms of the exemplars and prizes that they provide—shape the ideation process and outcomes in such contests. Although seekers’ decisions about the exemplars to show and prizes to offer may be independent from one another, we show that certain aspects of these decisions jointly impact the extent to which solvers adopt seekers’ exemplars in their ideas. This finding demonstrates that individual facets of seeker involvement could intertwine and have intricate effects on solvers right from the initiation of the contests. We further show that, by influencing solvers’ exemplar adoption, seekers can also affect the effectiveness of the ideas. All in all, our results indicate that seekers acquire ideas not just through the crowd but also with the crowd, and they play an active role in how and what solvers ideate. Instead of simply delegating idea generation to solvers, seekers should thus share the onus of ideation and be aware of the impacts of their involvement in contests.

• 저널Information Systems Research · 30(2) · 486–506
• 토픽Open Source Software Innovations · Computer Science Applications
• DOI10.1287/isre.2018.0810
• 저자Tat Koon Koh