Paper ID

1616

Paper Type

full

Description

Organizations increasingly apply crowdsourcing to search for novel ideas. However, in selecting ideas, organizations face the challenge to select the best suggestions without prematurely rejecting the distant solutions they initially set out to find. We argue that local search leads to differences between crowd and organizational evaluators. Further, organizational evaluation is restricted by the use of formal evaluation criteria. We propose that crowds can alleviate this by detecting ideas otherwise overlooked by organizational evaluators. Our analysis is based on 869 crowdsourced ideas evaluated by the crowd and by organizational evaluators. Our results suggest that the favorite ideas of the crowd are more novel than the organization’s favorites. We also find that the crowd can be used to detect ideas that were, despite their potential, initially overlooked but later implemented by the organization. We contribute to literature on local search and its repercussions in the evaluation of crowdsourced ideas for implementation.

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Distant Search, but Local Implementation? Using the Crowd’s Evaluation to Overcome Organizational Limitations in the Selection of Crowdsourced Ideas

Organizations increasingly apply crowdsourcing to search for novel ideas. However, in selecting ideas, organizations face the challenge to select the best suggestions without prematurely rejecting the distant solutions they initially set out to find. We argue that local search leads to differences between crowd and organizational evaluators. Further, organizational evaluation is restricted by the use of formal evaluation criteria. We propose that crowds can alleviate this by detecting ideas otherwise overlooked by organizational evaluators. Our analysis is based on 869 crowdsourced ideas evaluated by the crowd and by organizational evaluators. Our results suggest that the favorite ideas of the crowd are more novel than the organization’s favorites. We also find that the crowd can be used to detect ideas that were, despite their potential, initially overlooked but later implemented by the organization. We contribute to literature on local search and its repercussions in the evaluation of crowdsourced ideas for implementation.