Idea Selection in Web‐Enabled Ideation Systems

Abstract

Organizations increasingly implement web-enabled ideation systems to involve the diverse crowd of distributed employees in ideation. While recent studies have started to investigate which types of data generated in these systems can support managers in their selection decisions, less attention has been placed on the crowd of contributors and the idea itself. Building on team diversity and information processing literatures, this study extends current research by examining how contributors' knowledge diversity, the framing of their feedback (positive and negative), and the degree of idea elaboration influence selection decisions in web-enabled ideation systems. Understanding the role of contributors is arguably important considering that the increasing integration of community functionalities enables employees to participate not only by generating ideas, but also by offering different types of knowledge and feedback to others' ideas, thus giving rise to new forms of online participation. At the same time, individuals' abilities and efforts invested in the formulation of ideas are claimed to influence how managers evaluate them, an aspect that has received limited attention in these online settings. This study is based on a rich and extensive data set of 726 ideas and 2925 comments submitted by employees to an online ideation platform of a large European firm over the course of 16 months. The findings reveal that different forms of contributors' diversity and the framing of their feedback have differential effects on idea selection. Ideas attracting contributors from different functional domains are more likely to be selected by managers, while geographic diversity does not have a significant effect on selection. Moreover, feedback that is negatively framed tends to decrease the selection chances of an idea. Finally, ideas with an optimal degree of elaboration are more likely to be selected by managers for funding. Implications for both innovation management research and practitioners are discussed. Practitioner PointsThis study sheds lights on which data generated in web-enabled ideation systems can act as filtering heuristics for managers for supporting their selection decisions.Managers should not only attract a large crowd of contributors, but also consider the types of participants to engage in complementing ideas to enable access to diverse knowledge domains and expertise.The study points to the importance of considering the framing of feedback at the collective level. Feedback that is negatively framed may direct managers' attention toward critiques and limitations of an idea, reducing its likelihood of selection.Managers should pay attention to the degree of elaboration of ideas. Tools may be provided in the platform to improve the description of ideas, making sure that enough details are provided for ideas to be understood while not becoming too redundant.

Persuasion in Corporate Idea Contests: The Moderating Role of Content Scarcity on Decision‐Making

“…The similarities between the ideator and the evaluator, such as their age, gender, and language, or their organizational, hierarchical, and structural distance, are intuitive aspects that evaluators might then reasonably use to substitute reflective decision‐making (Antons, Declerck, Diener, Koch, and Piller, ; Beretta, ; Criscuolo et al, ; Reitzig and Sorenson, ; Schweisfurth, Zaggl, and Schöttl, ). Probably for that reason, Beretta () also controls for the ideators' anonymity, which can be regarded as a decisive factor in many of the ideator dimension's persuasive aspects (Hovland et al, ). However, even if the ideator is unknown to the evaluator, the community and idea description could still provide sufficiently motivational persuasive material for the evaluator to not carry out a fully reflective decision‐making process.…”

“…However, even if the ideator is unknown to the evaluator, the community and idea description could still provide sufficiently motivational persuasive material for the evaluator to not carry out a fully reflective decision‐making process. The literature only investigates the ideator's efforts to successfully promote an idea to the evaluators and the community's promotional aspects to some extent by analyzing the message's style and the ideators' passion (Beretta, ; Chen et al, ; Hoornaert et al, ; Piezunka and Dahlander, ). The results give a first glimpse into persuasive factors but fail to provide a comprehensive statement.…”

“…While all these aspects address intuition regarding decision‐making and when, due to time or motivational reasons, it is more likely to occur, a few studies also control for the amount of idea content provided (Beretta, ; Criscuolo et al, ; Piezunka and Dahlander, ; Schweisfurth et al, ). This amount is important, because the idea description is the only way of obtaining issue‐relevant information and of making a reflective decision.…”

“…Organizations increasingly endeavor to leverage individual creativity through online ideation platforms in order to harness the ideas of their customers, users (Poetz and Schreier, ), and employees (Björk and Magnusson, ). Corporate online ideation platforms tap into employees' creativity and knowledge in a closed setting, generating a large amount of high‐quality ideas and thus adding to an organization's innovation portfolio (Beretta, ; Kock, Heising, and Gemünden, ; Zhu, Kock, Wentker, and Leker, ). Since not all ideas can be implemented, the large number of generated ideas require a careful evaluation of idea quality.…”

“…For example, sentiments—emotions transmitted by written communication—can be conveyed in the idea description or corresponding comments. Characteristics of the ideator and the contributing community can also convey issue‐irrelevant information (Beretta, ; Piezunka and Dahlander, ). These findings are in line with the Yale attitude change approach (Hovland et al, ), one of the best known factor‐based theories in the area of decision‐making and persuasion, as it allows an understanding of the factors that play a role in persuading recipients of information.…”