Gathering and evaluating innovation ideas using crowdsourcing: Impact of the idea title and the description on the number of votes in each phase of a two‐phase crowdsourcing project

Abstract

Organizations are using crowdsourcing to capture innovation knowledge from the crowd in the form of ideas and then using the crowd to evaluate those ideas using votes. In this paper, we investigate a crowdsourcing setting in which Canada solicited information from its citizens to develop a digital transformation strategy. Canada used a two‐phase approach. Phase 1 was used to determine which ideas had the largest number of crowd votes, whereas in Phase 2, the crowd voted on the 30 leading vote‐getting ideas to determine the three winning ideas. This research investigates the ability to use information from ideas to estimate the number of votes that the ideas generate. This approach could be used to estimate the number of ideas, before making information available to the crowd. The unstructured text information in the idea is structured by using target concept dictionaries, which are used to estimate the extent to which the dictionary words appear in the ideas (e.g., “globalism”) and are related to the number of votes. Using this approach, roughly 1% of the total words are used to explain roughly 60% of the variance in the votes. Further, we also find that the variables associated with Phase 1 votes are not the same variables associated with Phase 2 votes; that is, the decision‐making variables changed. Finally, we find that votes are statistically significantly related to the content in the idea titles and the idea statements.