Divergent Innovation: Directing the Wisdom of Crowd to Tackle Societal Challenges

Presenter Information

Chuhan Cao, University of Science and Technology of ChinaFollow
Jiantao Zhu, University of Science and Technology of ChinaFollow
Bingqing Xiong, Deakin UniversityFollow
Eric Lim, UNSW SydneyFollow
Hefu Liu, School of Management, University of Science and Technology of ChinaFollow
Zhao Cai, University of Nottingham Ningbo ChinaFollow
Chee-Wee Tan, Copenhagen Business SchoolFollow

Paper Number

2337

Paper Type

Completed

Description

Crowdsourcing is acknowledged as a promising avenue for addressing societal challenges by drawing on the wisdom of the crowd to offer diverse solutions to complex problems. Advancing a new conceptual framework of ‘divergent innovation’ which delineates between topic and quality divergence as focal metrics of performance when crowdsourcing for solutions to societal challenges, this study investigates the impacts of four ideation stimuli on divergent innovation. These four stimuli include task description concreteness, resource richness, topic entropy, and judging criteria comprehensiveness. Empirical analysis based on data sourced from an online crowd-ideation platform reveals that task description concreteness negatively affects topic divergence but positively influences quality divergence, whereas resource richness positively affects topic divergence but negatively influences quality divergence. Additionally, the relationship between topic entropy and topic divergence is U-shaped, with no significant impact on quality divergence. These findings contribute to extant literature on crowdsourcing and offer invaluable insights for practitioners.

Comments

05-SocImpact

Recommended Citation

Cao, Chuhan; Zhu, Jiantao; Xiong, Bingqing; Lim, Eric; Liu, Hefu; Cai, Zhao; and Tan, Chee-Wee, "Divergent Innovation: Directing the Wisdom of Crowd to Tackle Societal Challenges" (2023). ICIS 2023 Proceedings. 4.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2023/soc_impactIS/soc_impactIS/4