Collective firm-internal online idea development

Abstract

Purpose New opportunities to nurture good ideas for innovation arise as firms use web-based ideation platforms for collective idea generation and development. What influences creative performance in firm-internal collective idea development is however not as well researched as idea generation and thus an important area of research is the feedback and commenting on ideas. More specifically, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas in collective firm-internal online idea development. Design/methodology/approach An empirical study has been performed, drawing on data collected from a Swedish multi-national company using a web-based system for collective firm-internal ideation. The investigation explicitly captures the effects on ideation performance played by idea development contributions, in terms of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas. Findings The empirical results show that idea development is significantly influenced by feedback timeliness as well as by the knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas. Specifically, it is found that longer time to feedback and an increased knowledge overlap result in an increased likelihood of idea acceptance. However, beyond a certain point, the positive effects of a longer time to feedback and increased knowledge overlap decrease, resulting in curvilinear relationships with idea acceptance. Research limitations/implications The results do not only shed new light on theory about collective idea development, but also provides management implications for collective firm-internal ideation. As the data used in the study has been collected in one single firm, care should be taken in generalizing the results to other domains. Practical implications The results inform managers that it is not always better to involve more individuals in these emergent and distributed ideation systems, but that it might be beneficial to take measures to exercise some control in terms of when distributed and diverse employees can freely join in and out, especially considering the diversity of ideas, comments and creators. Originality/value The results from the empirical study reveal the effects of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap on idea development. This provides us with new insights on the complex dynamics at place in collective firm-internal idea development and offers implications for how we can fruitfully manage this process.

Exploring the effects of problem- and solution-related knowledge sharing in internal crowdsourcing

“…Comment amount: Comment amount refers to the overall attention that idea has created around itself (Di Vincenzo et al , 2021; Schemmann et al , 2016). It has been argued as a factor that affects the acceptance of ideas (Chen et al , 2020; Di Vincenzo et al , 2021). Thus, the number of comments per idea is added as a control variable.…”

“…Author response is measured by the number of comments contributed by idea authors in relation to each idea. This measurement followed the studies of Chen et al (2020), Di Vincenzo et al (2021) and Zhu et al (2019). This variable therefore reflects the degree to which idea authors were involved in the discussion about their ideas (Zhu et al , 2019) and the shared knowledge in idea development.…”

“…4.2.3.1 Control variables about the idea itself. As idea characteristics such as their sentiment, scope and length have been found to be critical factors in idea development (Chen et al, 2020), they are regarded as control variables at the idea level in this study.…”

“…Author response, in the form of feedback given by an idea creator, has been argued to be one of the most important factors for idea survival (Chen et al, 2020;Di Vincenzo et al, 2021). Furthermore, research on knowledge sharing on ideas shows that knowledge j JOURNAL OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT j exchange primarily blossoms if it is bidirectional with author responses (Dahlander and Piezunka, 2014;Zhu et al, 2019).…”

“…As a sub-process of idea management, idea development in internal crowdsourcing follows the generation of an idea, but precedes its evaluation/selection (Beretta et al , 2019; Chen et al , 2020; Zhu et al , 2019). Compared to the traditional approaches to the management of ideas in the early stage of innovation, the differences brought by the usage of internal crowdsourcing are pronounced and dominated by a collective and transparent idea-development process.…”