The effects of crowdsourcing contribution type and temporal consistency on new product development success

Abstract

Extant literature suggests that individuals contribute to crowdsourcing programs in various ways but offers few insights about whether participants' creative contributions (original new product submissions) or their evaluative contributions (scoring or commenting on others' submissions) have a greater impact on their ability to create commercializable new products. Using a large-scale data set obtained from the crowdsourcing website Threadless. com, our study examines the relative impact of participants' creative and evaluative contributions and the effects of different types of evaluative contributions on submission success (i.e., a participant's ability to generate a commercializable new product). Our findings reveal that submission success is enhanced when participants generate both creative and evaluative contributions. In addition, we find that submission success depends not only on the volume of the creative contributions that a participant makes but also on the temporal consistency with which said contributions are made (i.e., adopting a consistent vs. a sporadic submission pattern). Specifically, our findings show that a participant's creative contribution consistency enhances their submission success, especially when creative contribution volume is high. This research extends the existing crowdsourcing literature by offering new insights about how contribution type and contribution consistency in a crowdsourcing program impact submission success.

The impact of crowdsourcing and user-driven innovation on R&D departments’ innovation activity: Application of multivariate correspondence analysis

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Innovation contests: attracting new solvers and new high‐quality solutions

“…In response to the growing popularity of innovation contests in industry, academic literature theoretically and empirically explored the drivers of innovation contest performance; for a recent and comprehensive review see Segev (2020). The literature suggests that awards (Terwiesch and Xu, 2008; Erat and Krishnan, 2012; Liu et al, 2014; Hofstetter et al, 2018), solver ranking or skills level (Yücesan, 2013; Mack and Landau, 2020), solver creative and evaluative contributions (O'Hern et al, 2022), intellectual property rights arrangements (Mazzola et al, 2018), solver's perceived experience during the contest (Fuller et al, 2011), and the number of solvers involved (Fullerton and McAfee, 1999; Boudreau et al, 2011) all affect contest performance.…”