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Generating Ideas on Online Platforms: A Case Study of “My Starbucks Idea”
Abstract
The objective of this study is to explore the factors that are keys for an idea to be implemented on an online crowdsourcing platform. A data set of 320 implemented ideas from My Starbucks Idea – an online crowdsourcing platform – has been analyzed. We find that only one out of 500 users’ submitted ideas are selected for implementation. The number of implemented ideas increases significantly at the early stage of the platform. At the mature stage, even though an increasing number of ideas are submitted, implemented ideas are proportionately low. Among the three categories of ideas – product, experience, and involvement – ideas of the product category are implemented with lower values of some associated variables than that of the experience category whereas those values in the involvement category are higher. Linked ideas need lower scores than sole ideas to get implemented. The chance that an idea to be implemented largely depends on votes received by and points earned on that idea.
... Creativity is the ability to generate novel useful ideas and innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas (Sinay, 2018 (2017), as professors were given more freedom in the classroom to design lessons, learning materials, and assignments, they were also able to encourage and support students in the dual use of technology and creativity. The Internet served as an important way to collaborate with stakeholders (Hossain & Islam, 2015). Thus being supported by Donato (2017), he indicated that with cloud technology increased teamwork, streamlining, and uniting goals, and crowdsources ideas helped make organizations smarter;therefore there was no need to wait to see creativity skyrocket. ...
... They purported that the importance of stakeholders' interaction for ideation was not a new phenomenon, but the widespread availability of the Internet significantly increased the ability to interact with stakeholders (Hossain & Islam, 2015). ...
... The integration of stakeholders as part of the external innovation processes was crucial (Hossain & Islam, 2015). According to the Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), promoting innovation in the learning environment was not at all easy (Pisanu, 2014). ...
This dissertation has joined the vibrant conversation in the United States Virgin Islands about the challenging nature in which teachers integrated Virgin Islands’ Cultural Standards in Virgin Islands History and other subjects across the curriculum. It explored the perception of teachers on the implementation of a learning device to be used in every classroom. Collectively, The Crossing Paths Framework with Cultural Standards, VI Teachers’ Effectiveness Standards, Common Core Career and Readiness Standards, and the Danielson Framework (The Crossing Paths Framework) in this study has been analyzed as a creative curricular tool. It has enhanced the adaptation of Virgin Islands History and Culture across the curriculum. Consequently, the review of literature reinforced the use of The Crossing Paths Framework as an ideal tool/instrument that enhanced the teaching of Virgin Islands History and Culture in our schools. The study has focused on attaining the perception of teachers in having used The Crossing Paths Framework for guided learning. In addition, the research substantiated the perception that this framework was an effective tool/instrument that met best practices. Lastly, the results of the study validated and corroborated the perception of teachers in the use of the Crossing Paths Framework as an operative tool for teaching and learning.
... The underlying rationale is that "the collective intelligence" of a large number of contributors outside the firm's boundaries increases the likelihood of achieving high-quality ideas with exceptional business potential (Cappa et al., 2019;Howe, 2006). For instance, Netflix has used crowdsourcing to improve its algorithms (Hallinan & Striphas, 2014), Starbucks has generated product ideas from customers (Hossain & Islam, 2015), and Dell (Bayus, 2013) and IBM (Bjelland & Wood, 2008) have adopted crowdsourcing for new product design. ...
... Hence, this type of task may have a higher requirement for in-depth expertise but a lower requirement for new perspectives from tasksolvers. Meanwhile, a generalist task, such as designing a chair, requires a broader range of domain knowledge (Hossain & Islam, 2015;L. Yu & Nickerson, 2011), and the solution space for people to explore is wider as well. ...
... Therefore, when facing this type of task, professionals may mainly apply their expertise, whereas the crowd members, due to their lack of domain knowledge, may mainly apply divergent thinking. Generalist tasks, however, require a broader range of domain knowledge (Hossain & Islam, 2015;L. Yu & Nickerson, 2011), and the solution space for people to explore diverse perspectives is wider as well. ...
Studies promote crowdsourcing as an alternative source of creativity for companies. By investigating whether a boundary exists in crowdsourcing for innovation, we aim to identify the conditions under which the generic crowd (mainly consisting of novices, instead of professionals) is less creative. Based on the componential theory of creativity, we compare the crowd's and professionals’ creativity, focusing on generalist versus specialist tasks. Leveraging online experiments and semantic analysis, we find that the crowd is more creative than professionals in solving generalist tasks. However, the crowd is less innovative than professionals in solving specialist tasks, thereby suggesting a boundary to crowdsourcing. Nevertheless, to solve specialist tasks, members of the crowd can gain relevant knowledge by exposing themselves to each other's ideas, thereby suggesting an attempt to break the boundary. This study offers new insights into the boundary of crowdsourcing for innovation.
... In a collaborative crowdsourcing community, users voluntarily respond to a company's call for idea generation tasks (Bayus, 2013) and offer a large number of ideas related to various functions and types of products (Hossain & Islam, 2015a, 2015b. However, the quality of the proposed ideas cannot be guaranteed. ...
... Based on the survey of the extant literature, we identify three research gaps, which we seek to fill in this paper. Hossain and Islam (2015b) implemented in the past or previous adoption experience) positively influences idea implementation likelihood. ...
... Then, we control for same day submission as a time characteristic. Same day submission is defined as the number of other ideas submitted the same day after the idea is removed (Hossain & Islam, 2015a, 2015b. In addition, dummy year variables are used to control other unobserved time difference effects (Table 2). ...
In collaborative crowdsourcing communities for open innovation, users generate and submit ideas as idea co‐creators. Firms then select and implement valuable ideas for new product development. Despite the popularity and success of these open innovation communities, relatively little is known about the factors that determine the implementation of the user‐generated ideas. Based on research on individual creativity, we propose a conceptual model integrating users' previous experience, idea presentation characteristics and feedback valence to explain the likelihood of idea implementation. We validate our research model with a panel data analysis of 43 550 ideas submitted by 16 360 users in the MIUI new product development community hosted by Xiaomi, a large electronics manufacturing company in China. We find an inverted U‐shaped relationship between users' past successful experience and idea implementation. Furthermore, the length of ideas is positively associated with the likelihood of idea implementation. There is also an inverted U‐shaped relationship between supporting evidence and idea implementation. Finally, we demonstrate the negative effect of positive feedback and the positive effect of negative feedback on idea implementation. These findings offer rich insights to understand the phenomenon of open innovation better. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
... Poprzez crowdvoting twórcy mogą poznać również potrzeby odbiorców oraz ich oczekiwania wobec produktu. Głosowaniu mogą być poddawane opublikowane przez twórcę innowacje (Majchrzak & Malhotra, 2013) lub zgłaszane przez społeczność pomysły nowych produktów i rozszerzenia funkcjonalności już istniejących (Hossain & Islam, 2015). Przykładowo, platforma zakupowa Allegro wprowadziła specjalny serwis spolecznosc.allegro.pl ...
... Taka metoda angażowania rozszerza twórcom perspektywę spojrzenia na produkt, daje wgląd w opinie użytkowników, jest kopalnią darmowych pomysłów, i w konsekwencji, pozwala udoskonalić produkt zgodnie z oczekiwaniami odbiorców. Ważnym kryterium przy wyborze pomysłów wykorzystywanych w tworzeniu produktu jest ich wykonywalność (Hossain & Islam, 2015). W wymienionych wyżej przykładach pochodzących z portalu Allegro, twórcy postawili na nową zakładkę z zaakceptowanymi pomysłami, aby okazać lojalność wobec udzielającej się społeczności. ...
Cel/Teza: Celem artykułu jest analiza i omówienie dostępnych narzędzi crowdsourcingowych używanych na poszczególnych etapach procesu projektowego stron internetowych i aplikacji mobilnych. Praca stanowi omówienie i opracowanie dostępnych metod angażowania użytkownika i sygnalizuje efekty wynikające z takiej współpracy. Koncepcja i metody badawcze: Ze względu na dynamiczny rozwój samego crowdsourcingu, poszczególne techniki angażowania użytkowników zostały zebrane przez autora na podstawie kompleksowej analizy piśmiennictwa naukowego i branżowego (w tym serwisów internetowych dla praktyków dziedzinowych), podręczników oraz raportów komercyjnych. Platformy crowdsourcingowe wykorzystywane w procesie projektowania, ze względu na swój praktyczny charakter, zostały ponadto opatrzone przykładami implementacji, w celu lepszego wyjaśnienia ich funkcjonowania. Wyniki i wnioski: Dostępne platformy crowdsourcingowe obecne są na każdym z etapów projektowania aplikacji mobilnych i stron internetowych – stanowią kopalnię pomysłów i opłacalne rozwiązanie z ekonomicznego punktu widzenia. W większości koncentrują się one tylko na podsuwaniu nieustrukturyzowanych sugestii i walidacji wdrożonych już rozwiązań. Crowdsourcing w niewielkim stopniu wykorzystuje się przy faktycznym budowaniu narzędzi cyfrowych. Autor zlokalizował jednak, istniejące już teraz przykłady angażowania użytkowników w proces projektowania produktów i usług cyfrowych, które w najbliższej przyszłości mogą przeobrazić się w rozwiązania crowdsourcingowe. Oryginalność/Wartość poznawcza: Zgodnie z wiedzą autora, przedstawiony temat nie był jeszcze opracowany w piśmiennictwie zarówno polskim, jak i międzynarodowym. Artykuł jest pierwszą próbą holistycznej analizy i sklasyfikowania poszczególnych narzędzi crowdsourcingowych wykorzystywanych w praktyce projektowania produktów i usług cyfrowych.
... Crowdsourcing can be used by organisations for solving typical organisational problems (from product development, to asking for feedback as far as services are concerned, to facilitating information management or idea generation) (Brabham, 2013), as far as publics are motivated enough to engage in this sort of relationship with organisations. Cases such as My Starbucks Ideas (used to obtain feedback from customers) and Dell's Idea Storm (a platform intended to collect ideas from crowds) stand as solid examples of individuals engaging on crowdsourcing platforms on the basis of intrinsic motivation, which appear to be more prevalent than extrinsic motivation when the task is simple (Hossain & Islam, 2015). ...
... Crowdsourcing participants need to be motivated for contributing on the platforms and various forms of incentives, both extrinsic and intrinsic ones, can be used in this sense, which will later be explored in this research chapter. Although research on crowdsourcing systems is still at a beginning (Zhao & Zhu, 2014a, p. 425), motivation has been investigated in several studies (Boudreau, Lakhani, Woolley, Gaule, & Riedl, 2014;Brabham, 2008Brabham, , 2010Estellés-Arolas & Ladründe-Guevara, 2012;Heo & Toomey, 2015;Hossain & Islam, 2015), which underlined the importance of economic rewards, but also social recognition, personal fulfilment, entertainment and individual skills development. However, some findings are conflicting, especially in regard to the importance of material motivators across varying crowdsourcing cases (Brabham, 2010). ...
... Members of these communities can share suggestions for improvements on a company's products or services, or publicly express their opinions by voting, commenting, rating, ranking, or buying idea stocks (Klein and Garcia, 2015). When the firm decides to dismiss an idea or, (Hossain and Islam, 2015;MyStarbucksIdea, 2015). Identifying the 'needles in the haystack' can be a challenge. ...
... In sum, it is unclear whether and to what extent data regarding the crowd's response to an idea is likely to be informative regarding an idea's probability of implementation. (Bayus, 2013;Di Gangi and Wasko, 2009;Hossain and Islam, 2015); this approach ensures that the ideas analyzed have a certain degree of value and usefulness (Franke, von Hippel, and Schreier, 2006;Levitt, 1963). posted three ideas or more. ...
Crowdsourcing ideas from consumers can enrich idea input in new product development. After a decade of initiatives (e.g., Starbucks' MyStarbucksIdea, Dell's IdeaStorm), the implications of crowdsourcing for idea generation are well understood, but challenges remain in dealing with the large volume of rapidly generated ideas produced in crowdsourcing communities. This study proposes a model that can assist managers in efficiently processing crowdsourced ideas by identifying the aspects of ideas that are most predictive of future implementation and identifies three sources of information available for an idea: its content, the contributor proposing it, and the crowd's feedback on the idea (the "3Cs"). These information sources differ in their time of availability (content/contributor information is available immediately; crowd feedback accumulates over time) and in the extent to which they comprise structured or unstructured data. This study draws from prior research to operationalize variables corresponding to the 3Cs and develops a new measure to quantify an idea's distinctiveness. Applying automated information retrieval methods (latent semantic indexing) and testing several linear methods (linear discriminant analysis, regularized logistic regression) and nonlinear machine-learning algorithms (stochastic adaptive boosting, random forests), this article identifies the variables that are most useful towards predicting idea implementation in a crowdsourcing community for an IT product (Mendeley). Our results indicate that consideration of content and contributor information improves ranking performance between 22.6 and 26.0% over random idea selection, and that adding crowd-related information further improves performance by up to 48.1%. Crowd feedback is the best predictor of idea implementation, followed by idea content and distinctiveness, and the contributor's past idea-generation experience. Firms are advised to implement two idea selection support systems: one to rank new ideas in real time based on content and contributor experience, and another that integrates the crowd's idea evaluation after it has had sufficient time to provide feedback.
... Through this programme, P&G has successfully launched several products by leveraging ideas and technologies from entrepreneurs, researchers and other companies. ˗ Starbucks has implemented an online platform called 'My Starbucks Idea' (Hossain & Islam, 2015), which allows customers to submit, discuss, and vote on ideas for new products, customer experience enhancements, and corporate social responsibility initiatives. This platform has led to the implementation of several customer-suggested ideas, such as the introduction of new beverages and reusable cup initiatives. ...
... Through this programme, P&G has successfully launched several products by leveraging ideas and technologies from entrepreneurs, researchers and other companies. ˗ Starbucks has implemented an online platform called 'My Starbucks Idea' (Hossain & Islam, 2015), which allows customers to submit, discuss, and vote on ideas for new products, customer experience enhancements, and corporate social responsibility initiatives. This platform has led to the implementation of several customer-suggested ideas, such as the introduction of new beverages and reusable cup initiatives. ...
In today's rapidly evolving and highly competitive business environment, effective management of employee-generated ideas is a critical element for organisational innovation and growth. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review that consolidates the historical development and evolutionary trajectory of employee idea management practices. The journey of employee idea management can be traced from basic suggestion boxes to cutting-edge digital platforms and AI-driven systems, encompassing theoretical foundations, technological advancements and organisational implications. Understanding this trajectory enables organisations to adapt to changing trends and develop sustainable strategies that promote innovation and continuous improvement. To secure long-term success, organisations can acquire valuable knowledge for fostering a culture of idea sharing and innovation by combining the narratives of historical development and contemporary innovation.
... Of particular interest for the research presented in the following pages is their cluster of "open innovation intermediaries", including intermediaries that "can be formal or informal organizations, operating in different fields, whose goal is to facilitate open innovation processes among firms or other organizations (e.g., universities) or individuals (e.g., seekers and solvers; communities of practice)" (Caloffi et al., 2023, p. 6). Also, the role of platforms as intermediaries has been considered (Daniel et al., 2018) besides or in support of innovation project managers or teams in search of ideas outside their organizations (Aquilani et al., 2017;Garcia Martinez et al., 2014;Hossain and Islam, 2015;Lopez and Vanhaverbeke, 2010). Thus, in these latter cases, the human and organizational intermediaries are connected to technical or digital tools that intermediate their search and collaborative goals along the innovation value chain (Katzy et al., 2013). ...
This article explores how to help people who organize crowdsourcing events (called "seekers") choose the best ideas from those submitted by participants (called "solvers'). To this end, we created a method using techniques like topic modeling and text analysis to sort and group ideas. Then, we tested this method on data from crowdsourcing contests in Italy in 2021. In particular, considering the literature on intermediaries, we focus on intermediation in crowdsourcing to improve the decision-making processes in those initiatives where searching activities are intermediated by digital platforms, besides other human intermediaries. This method makes it easier for seekers to handle multiple ideas, and it also helps them find better-quality ideas. Moreover, from a theoretical point of view, our method could lead to better results in crowdsourcing challenges because it groups ideas based on their content without being influenced by the organizers' pre-existing knowledge or biases. This means that seekers might discover new and unexpected topics or solutions they hadn't thought of before. From a practical standpoint, for managers organizing crowdsourcing events, this method is valuable because it not only saves time and effort but also potentially uncovers innovative and diverse ideas. Additionally, the method includes a feature that shows how much participants interact and share knowledge, thus implementing the concept of "transactivity", which, to the best of our knowledge, hasn't been used in crowdsourcing studies before. This can help crowdsourcing organizers better understand which contests are more effective at encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing among participants.
... The open innovation community has become a platform for enterprises to absorb suggestions to improve products and services from users. However, with increased user participation, the community faces severe information overload [1]. The excessive amounts of creative ideas make it difficult to identify which pieces of ideas are worth implementing, which could cause high-quality creative ideas to be hindered and could not receive sufficient attention. ...
The identification and implementation of high-quality ideas have been hindered in the open innovation community due to information overload. Most existing studies tended to utilize the factors that influence the quality of ideas to construct the methods to assess the quality of ideas, which ignores the deeper information contained in the community system environment where the creative idea is located. This paper regards a community as a complex social system formed by user sharing and interaction from a systemic perspective. A one-class graph moderating attention neural network model (OCGMAT) is constructed to map this social network system and mine the in-depth information of the system’s impact on ideas quality, especially the moderating effect of interactive emotion. The OCGMAT model includes five layers, a mapping layer to map the network information of the social system to graph-structured data, a multi-head moderating attention layer to calculate the attention coefficient between the two neighboring nodes under the moderating effect of interactive emotion, two convolutional layers to extract the deep representation of features, a fully connected layer to classify the quality of creative ideas. The experiments for OCGMAT, GAT, GNN, and other classification-based models have been conducted on the creative ideas dataset from the Meizu open innovation community, which shows that the OCGMAT model outperforms other methods with high accuracy of 93.22%. Finally, according to the predictions, we take measures to manage creative ideas and improve innovation effectiveness.
... Additional evidence supporting this issue comes from research on crowdsourcing. Firms are able to crowdsource innovative ideas, but only implement one out of 500 ideas proposed by the community (Hossain & Islam, 2015). Moreover, crowdsourcing exposes firms to knowledge leakages, therefore strategies to mitigate this exposure while still being able to capture value from the crowdsourced ideas are a key concern of crowdsourcing platforms (de Jong et al., 2016;Lakhani & Lonstein, 2008). ...
... However, organizations are faced with the challenge of identifying the most promising ideas among a large number of suggestions. For example, out of 162,156 ideas submitted to the MyStarbucksIdea platform, only 320 were adopted (Hossain and Islam, 2015). To address this challenge, firms may benefit from soliciting feedback from consumers on these ideas, who can evaluate customer ideas based on their preferences and help identify promising suggestions (Hofstetter et al., 2018;Toubia and Flor es, 2007). ...
Purpose
Online brand communities (OBCs) are important platforms to obtain consumers' ideas. The purpose of this study is to examine how peer influence and consumer contribution behavior simulate innovative behaviors in OBCs to increase idea quality.
Design/methodology/approach
Using a firm-hosted popular online brand community – Xiaomi Community (MIUI), the authors collected a set of data from 6567 consumers and then used structural equation modeling (SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to empirically test the impact of peer influence and consumer contribution behaviors on idea quality in OBCs.
Findings
The results of this study show that both peer influence breadth and depth have a positive effect on idea adoption and peer recognition, wherein proactive contribution behavior positively mediates these relationships, and responsive contribution behavior negatively mediates the impact of peer influence breadth and peer influence depth on peer recognition. A more detailed analysis using the fsQCA method further identifies four types of antecedent configurations for better idea quality.
Originality/value
Based on the attention-based view and the theory of learning by feedback, this study explores the factors that affect idea quality in the context of social networks and extends the research of peer influence in the digital age. The paper helps improve our understanding of how to promote customer idea quality in OBCs.
... Some have even gone further to create a 'news bank', often referred to as 'crowdsourcing'. Here, members submit and pass comments on news thus supplementing news from main stream media (Heinzelman & Waters, 2010;Hossaina & Islam, 2015). ...
The evolution in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has heralded the Web 2.0 Internet technology which has enabled yesterday's audience to be co-creators and distributors of information to large, scattered, heterogeneous audience. This development has led to the creation of a new genre of journalism called citizen journalism. This new genre has however generated a lot of debates as it effects the society, information flow as well as national security. This paper therefore presents two sides of the debate especially as it concerns its effects on national security. Thus, in achieving this, the paper provides the conceptual clarification of citizen journalism. Arguments reviewed in the paper appear to suggest that this 21 st century brand of journalism although facilitates democratization of news, has on the other hand created specific challenges for national security. Such challenges include spread of fake news, misinformation, disinformation which has further polarised Nigeria. This is why the paper concludes that in order to create a balance, and to prevent shutting down citizen journalism in its entirety due to its dangers; governments and policy makers are advised to look closely at existing legal frameworks such as the cyber act, defamation, libel, slander, and other related press laws with a view of regulating the activities of citizen journalists just as the mainstream media are being regulated.
... The governments almost in every country is giving a great attention for the betterment of the infrastructure, this is very helpful for the businesses like Starbucks to approach to new markets and the suppliers. The political aspect of the PEST analysis is favorable for the business expansion of Starbucks as it creates most of the opportunities (Hossain and Islam, 2015). ...
In this task, we have selected an association which is working at global dimension. This association is going to the Starbucks. It is putting forth espresso administrations to its clients at worldwide dimension and in the global market. In spite of the fact that it has been putting forth most vital administrations identified with the clients yet there is another thought for this association that it must need to give the taste offices in the associations as per request of its clients. It has been examining that there is need high spotlight on the individual need of each culture and requesting taste of each culture and nation as it has been enlisting workers from everywhere throughout the world. All of the provided services are pivotal requirements for the networks which will be given by the organization. It can likewise offer these administrations at global dimension. In this examination, there is a completed discussion about the target advertise for this new idea in the business and there will be a completed examination of monetary, social, political and regular effects of this new business thought. According to the examination of outside factors, it has been bankrupting down that these all are certain in this business to recognize the new idea as there is limit as for starting this unique organization to improve the proficiency and the profit of the continuous business. According to the creative condition, it is analyzed in this examination that these are also positive as the enlistment needs at universal market for the phenomenal administrations. There are a couple of threats to start this new idea in the business which joins the hazard for dissatisfaction and the low appropriateness from the customer side. With the failure of thought, there is a peril for losing the huge proportion of capital which is a remarkable hardship to the association. This contemplation is sensible as it is the enthusiasm of the customers of this relationship as it has been giving selection organizations to the customers and with the associate of planning workplaces with its customers, there will grow interest as the customers don't have need to go for finding another association to get the readiness organizations for the enlistment in global market. As the wrapped-up remarks, it has been exploring that this business thought is sensible and most fitting for this relationship as it has the positive results for affiliation. Starbucks has the open door at worldwide market to develop and to set up its business with the interesting thought. As indicated by all investigation, it has been assessed that it is a more extensive and practical open door for Starbucks to enter with the new and required preference for the global market.
... As UICs accumulate vast amounts of user innovation data, many studies have empirically examined user innovation behavior in the UIC context. These studies have mostly been Online game user innovation conducted in idea-generation UICs, such as Dell IdeaStorm, LEGO ideas, My Starbucks Idea, and Xiaomi community (Bayus, 2013;Di Gangi et al., 2010;Hossain and Islam, 2015;Liu et al., 2020;Piezunka and Dahlander, 2019;Qi et al., 2021). However, there have been few empirical studies investigating idea-realization UICs. ...
Purpose
In online user innovation communities (UICs), firms adopt external innovations beyond their internal resources and capabilities. However, little is known about the influences of organizational adoption or detailed adoption patterns on subsequent user innovation. This study aims to examine the influence of organizational adoption, including its level and timing, on users' subsequent innovation behavior and performance.
Design/methodology/approach
This research model was validated using a secondary dataset of 17,661 user–innovation pairs from an online UIC. The effect of organizational adoption on users' subsequent innovation likelihood was measured by conducting a panel logistic regression. Furthermore, the effects of organizational adoption on subsequent innovation’ quality and homogeneity and those of the adoption level and timing on subsequent innovation likelihood were tested using Heckman's two-step approach.
Findings
The authors found that organizational adoption negatively affects the likelihood of subsequent innovation and its homogeneity but positively affects its quality. Moreover, more timely and lower-level adoption can increase the likelihood of users' subsequent innovation.
Originality/value
This study comprehensively explores organizational adoption's effects on users' subsequent innovation behavior and performance, contributing to the literature on UICs and user innovation adoption. It also provides valuable practical implications for firms on how to optimize their adoption decisions to maintain the quantity, quality, and diversity of user innovations.
... Some have even gone further to create a 'news bank', often referred to as 'crowdsourcing'. Here, members submit and pass comments on news thus supplementing news from main stream media (Heinzelman & Waters, 2010;Hossaina & Islam, 2015). ...
The study investigated the awareness of pregnant women who are presently
attending antenatal careon the mother-to-child-transmission of HIV/AIDS in
Ilorin metropolis, using Focus Group Discussions (FGD) method to generate its
data from the purposely-sampled pregnant women. The study adopted the theory
of planned behaviorfocusing a cohort ofpregnant women attending public
andprivate antenatal care facilities for thefirst time in their current pregnancy.
Specifically, the study set out to explain intendedand actual HIV testing, using
theextended version of the TPB framework. The research sample size was
purposively selected. Three groups were organized in three different obstetrics
hospital and each group comprising of seven pregnant women as participants
while 25 structured focus group questions were used as a guide to collect the data
for the study. The ivory software program was usedto analyze the data generated.
The study found that 19 (90%) of the respondents were aware of the transmission
of HIV/AIDS from mother to child while 9 (38%) got to know of HIV/AIDS
through their school systemjust as 9 (38%) wereaware of the need for HIV test
during pregnancy at school. The study revealed that 6 (28%) rated the campaign
on prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS high while 13 (61%)
had no rating at all. Also, 7 (33%) rated the awareness of pregnant women about
the campaign on prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS high,
while 13 (61%) had no rating at all. The study concluded that the depth of
knowledge of the participants on the subject did not allow for deeper insight and
adequate response on the issues raised, suggesting that awareness of the pregnant
women on PMTCT was low. It therefore, recommended that media campaign on
mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS be intensified to boost awareness of
pregnant women about its spread.
... To obtain users' experiences related to the products, companies and designers often invite users to share their past experiences or participate in testing prototypes and then provide feedback (Bosch-Sijtsema & Bosch, 2015;DiSalvo, 2016;Tung & Lin, 2020). Additionally, companies such as Starbucks and Dell developed online platforms for users to share personal experiences and opinions conveniently and support product development and refinement (Bayus, 2013;Hossain & Islam, 2015). ...
Crowdsourcing is widely used to solve creative problems of ideation in HCI domain. To improve the creativity of crowdsourcing outcomes, researchers have proposed multiple approaches to support crowd workers’ idea proposal step. Other steps in designers’ creative process, such as information gathering and reflective activity, also impact idea creativity, while their effects in crowdsourcing scenarios remain unexplored. Therefore, referring to the creativity research, this study proposed an approach that optimized crowdsourcing tasks to help crowd workers perform information gathering and reflective activity. Two experiments involving 427 workers were conducted to test the effects of our approach. Results showed that instructing crowd workers to gather information and reflect on their ideas positively affected the creativity of crowdsourcing outcomes. This study provides inspiration for the optimization of crowdsourcing tasks and offers insights to the researchers who focus on using crowd power to achieve the ideation process.
... People generally are less skeptical toward the information sources that are perceived as unbiased [15]. The program encouraged customers and fans to share their ideas and suggestions on enhancing Starbucks's product and services to a better level and experiences [16]. Communication through online forums has excellent credibility and would come to build brand awareness in the long term. ...
... The extant research on idea adoption in VCCs has generally focused on three main categories: idea content, idea generator, and evaluation feedback, while few studies have paid sufficient attention to the persuasion cues and mechanisms that drive decisions and behaviors related to idea convergence, evaluation, and adoption. Most previous studies have mainly focused on exploring and analyzing the 5 common characteristics of crowd-generated ideas to develop theory-based models for predicting idea adoption (Ho-Dac, 2020;Hossain & Islam, 2015a;Hu et al., 2020;Lipusch et al., 2020;Q. Liu et al., 2020;X. ...
Building on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and absorptive capacity, this study develops a four-dimensional model of idea adoption in virtual crowdsourcing communities (VCCs) and examines the influence of different persuasion cues on idea adoption. The research model was tested using hierarchical logistic regression based on a dataset from the Tableau community. The results show that both community recognition of users and community recognition of ideas are positively related to idea adoption. Proactive user engagement has a significant positive impact on idea adoption, while reactive user engagement has no significant impact. Idea content quality, represented by idea length and supporting arguments, has an inverted U-shaped relationship with idea adoption. Community absorptive capacity positively moderates the curvilinear relationship between idea content quality and idea adoption. These results contribute to a better elucidation of the persuasion mechanisms underlying idea adoption in VCCs and thus provide important implications for open innovation research and practice.
... A well-known successful example is "my Starbucks Idea." When a member submitted an idea, he/ she was able to track whether his/her proposal had been reviewed by decision-makers and see the reactions of other members (Hossain and Islam, 2015). By offering both public recognition and monetary compensation to motivate customers, Starbucks was able to give customers an insight into what the company was doing and made them feel like an insider. ...
Purpose
This study aims to categorize user-generated content (UGC) based on the target audience, namely, brand-oriented content (BOC) and community-oriented content (COC). By using the equity theory, this study investigated how personal factors (motivations and self-construal) and brand/product factors (brand luxury) drive members to generate brand-oriented or COC.
Design/methodology/approach
Experimental studies were conducted with online brand community (OBC) participants who had been active in an OBC in the past 30 days.
Findings
Both in Studies 1 and 3, participants with an independent self-construal generated more BOC relative to COC, whereas participants with an interdependent self-construal generated more COC relative to BOC. In Study 1, extrinsically motivated participants generated more BOC relative to COC, whereas intrinsically motivated participants generated more COC relative to BOC. However, this finding was not confirmed in Study 3. In Study 2, the participants of luxury brand communities generated more COC relative to BOC, whereas participants of affordable brand communities generated more BOC relative to COC. However, this finding was not confirmed in Study 3.
Practical implications
This research provides marketing practitioners with an opportunity to focus on different motivation types in different contexts. The study also helps marketing departments understand the relationship between brand characteristics and UGC types. Finally, the insights of this study can also be useful in a brand extension context.
Originality/value
This study has constructed a better understanding of content generation in OBCs by categorizing UGC based on their target audience.
... Moreover, many companies have recognized the importance of customer voice and are paying more attention to it. For example, Starbucks established an online crowdsourcing platform named "My Starbucks Idea" to collect examples, such as ideas and suggestions, of customer voice and obtain valuable ideas for developing new drinks, improving service, and promoting the overall performance of the company (Hossain and Islam, 2015). ...
In this study, we define customer voice behavior as a consumer’s extra-role communicative behavior of offering suggestions or opinions to enterprises. We classified customer voice behavior into two dimensions: promotive and prohibitive voices. Furthermore, we explored the relationship between customer–company (C–C) identification and customer voice behavior. From a sample of 394 university students who were customers of food delivery services, the results showed that C–C identification was positively related to both promotive and prohibitive voices while felt responsibility for constructive change (FRCC) played a mediating role between C–C identification and both kinds of customer voice behavior. In addition, we found the moderating effects of self-impact, which could strengthen the impacts of FRCC on customer voice behavior and the mediating effects of FRCC. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are also discussed.
... Research shows that, in the Starbuck OIC, only one of the 500 user-submitted ideas was chosen for implementation, and whether an idea can be implemented depends largely on the degree of attention that the idea generates [61]. Therefore, interaction behavior helps improve the ideas in posts and reduce the uncertainty in decision making by facilitating better understanding [60]. ...
Open innovation communities (OICs) can help enterprises make full use of external knowledge resources from users, but problems such as low user participation and low conversion rate of creative ideas impact the efficiency of OICs. Most studies on this topic employ qualitative or empirical methods from a static perspective, but ignore the effect of interaction between enterprises and users as well as the cumulative effect of time. A discussion on the dynamic evolution process of open innovation is lacking. Based on a review of the literature on OICs, innovation performance, and system dynamics, this study proposes a conceptual model of innovation performance impact, which comprises the knowledge management, governance mechanism, and user behavior subsystems. Xiaomi’s OIC in China was selected as the research object, and relevant data were collected through a web spider. According to the system dynamics modeling method, a causal relationship analysis was carried out on the three aforementioned interrelated subsystems. Then, a stock flow chart with 32 variables was constructed to determine the initial values and calculation equations for each variable. Finally, the model was constructed and verified using Vensim PLE software. The simulation results were as follows. (1) The number of product releases in the Xiaomi OIC was positively correlated with the number of posts, comments, and views. Compared with user interaction behavior (i.e., commenting and viewing), the impact of user innovation behavior (i.e., posting) on enterprise innovation performance (i.e., number of patents) is clearer. Specifically, regarding interaction behavior, the impact of the users’ commenting behavior on innovation performance (i.e., number of product releases) was relatively clearer than that of their viewing behavior. (2) Governance mechanism (i.e., R&D investment and management expense), which comprises technical and organizational mechanisms, positively affected the innovation performance of enterprises. Compared with the organizational mechanism (i.e., management expense), the impact of the technical mechanism (i.e., R&D investment) on the innovation performance was clearer. (3) Governance mechanism helped to increase the number of users in the OIC, and, in turn, affected the user innovation and interaction behavior. (4) The technical mechanism positively affected knowledge application capability, which, in turn, had a positive impact on the innovation performance of enterprises. Based on these findings, management strategies are proposed for the establishment and development of OICs.
... Furthermore, it is also notable that key criteria for evaluation of many past metrics and studies developed in IMS research are based on correlation with idea successfulness typically reflected by ratio of past implemented ideas (Gangi and Wasko, 2009;Hossaina and Islam, 2015a). Some solutions even go further utilising those past implemented ideas, as input for supervised machine learning to predict the next big innovation (Yoo et al., 2015). ...
... Although defined as an issue within NPD we study this for both NPD as well as cost saving IT projects. Several cancellation rates are published (Barczak et al., 2009;Hossain & Islam 2015). Unlike this paper they did not study escalation of commitment. ...
... This project aims to contribute RM287 million to Malaysia's Growth National Income (GNI) by 2020. At the same time, it also will create 1,425 full time jobs by 2020, and estimated to create income for 340,000 task workers [16][17]. As household expenses are increasing every year, Malaysia government believes that by developing the paid crowdsourcing, it gives wide range of opportunities for the low income community earners to improve their livelihood and lifestyles. ...
World are now facing flood of low income community responding to current global issue regarding employment. Considering the advantages of crowdsourcing, it has been identified as one potential solution to the issue. Responding to that, the concept has been implemented in many developing countries that have high rate of low income community such as India, Nepal and Philippines. Through crowdsourcing, business and individual can achieve greater and higher productivity in faster and shorter period. Crowdsourcing offer flexibility in terms of time, locations and durations of doing tasks and the most important is crowdsourcing will give additional income to complement existing income that will help to uplift one's lifestyle hence reduce the rate of low income community. However, focusing on low income community as crowd worker for crowdsourcing require depth understanding on varies factors such as crowd education levels, skills, attitudes, language and etcetera. Visibly, there are numerous issues and challenges in the implementation process. Thus, this study aims to discuss the issues and challenges when dealing with low income community as crowd worker. This study presents seven vital factors that need to be taken into deliberation when dealing with low income community. The results and discussion from this study can be used as a road map to prepare an action plan for a successful crowdsourcing implementation for low income community.
... This impact is observable in the explosive surge in the popularity over the last decade of digital platforms for research and development (R&D), idea generation, prediction, freelance work, peer production, co-creation, product design, and public engagement, to name but a few. For example, Dell's IdeaStorm (Hossain & Islam, 2015a) and Starbucks' MyStarbucksIdea (Hossain & Islam, 2015b) are two digital crowdsourcing platforms that are used to engage crowds to solicit ideas from them (Bayus, 2013;Chua & Banerjee, 2013). Moreover, intermediary platforms, such as InnoCentive and IdeaConnection, are organizing online competitions to solve the problems of various organizations (Hossain, 2012). ...
Digital platforms, along with their supporting tools and features, have emerged as important enablers for firms to leverage distributed knowledge (Sedera et al., 2016), because they offer new ways for organizations to collaborate with the external environment for ideas, technologies, and knowledge. Indeed, studies have explored efforts to promote such collaboration on digital platforms with various popular names, such as crowdsourcing platforms (Afuah & Tucci, 2012), open innovation platforms (Frey et al., 2011), and online marketplaces (Dushnitsky & Klueter, 2011). Among others, the open innovation phenomenon highlights that these platforms have a far-reaching impact on how various parties innovate together through alliances, networks, and ecosystems (West & Bogers, 2014). This impact is observable in the explosive surge in the popularity over the last decade of digital platforms for research and development (R&D), idea generation, prediction, freelance work, peer production, co-creation, product design, and public engagement, to name but a few. For example, Dell’s IdeaStorm (Hossain & Islam, 2015a) and Starbucks’ MyStarbucksIdea (Hossain & Islam, 2015b) are two digital crowdsourcing platforms that are used to engage crowds to solicit ideas from them (Bayus, 2013; Chua & Banerjee, 2013). Moreover, intermediary platforms, such as InnoCentive and IdeaConnection, are organizing online competitions to solve the problems of various organizations (Hossain, 2012).
Although digital platforms provide new possibilities and competence, they however also bring new challenges for organizations, which call for new ways of organizing in order to fully embrace their potential. Understanding the role of these platforms in digital transformation is therefore crucial. We must recognize equally the opportunities and challenges digital platforms provide for organizations, and we need to understand the mechanisms and potential outcomes of various digital platforms. Consequently, we should consider digital platforms as a mechanism for accelerating the digital transformation endeavours many organizations are undertaking today (Berman, 2012). Despite
the high significance of various digital platforms, there is limited knowledge in the extant literature about the effect of digital platforms on the organization. Thus, here we discuss how digital platforms for ideas, technologies, and knowledge transfer act as enablers for digital transformation.
Digital innovation is an important, powerful tool for organizations pursuing digital
transformation. Differing from traditional innovation in its characteristics, digital innovation can be both faster and cheaper as well as make it easier for employees to get involved and contribute. In many contexts, employees can even be decisive in whether digital innovation succeeds. In that light, if organizations want to be able to utilize digital innovation their employees can be an important resource for innovation and provide valuable contributions.
In recent decades, the literature on innovation has shifted focus to more democratic innovation approaches, as exemplified by open innovation, user-driven innovation, and employee-driven innovation. The shift in focus stems from the acknowledgment that organizations can and should exploit more of the potential for innovation that they possess beyond what their research and development units and experts can achieve. Those approaches may include stakeholders in the organization’s environment as well as employees.
This thesis assumes that employees can constitute a decisive resource for digital innovation in organizations. Employees’ knowledge about the delivery of products and services and about the resources and structure of their organizations can provide a basis for important contributions to further developing value creation and value delivery at organizations, especially when organizations face increasing challenges with digitalization and digital transformation. But this involvement does not happen automatically in organizations, and if organizations seek to utilize this potential to a greater extent, it must be clearly valued by the management and facilitated.
In this thesis, I investigate how the phenomenon of employee-driven digital innovation can contribute to increase innovation in organizations and, in turn, provide opportunities for digital transformation. My investigation is based on data collected in five empirical studies that were conducted in three case organizations and that form the basis for an action research approach. In those studies, I identified drivers of and barriers to employee-driven digital innovation based
on the literature from adjacent concepts related to innovation. In turn, those insights were used to identify hackathons as a method of facilitating employee-driven digital innovation. The studies were performed in the context of public organizations, because the literature only partly sheds light on that context in research on employee-driven digital innovation.
This thesis aims to contribute to lifting the black box that surrounds employee-driven digital innovation in public organizations and to inspire employees and practitioners in public organizations to explore opportunities at their disposal and participate in more innovation-oriented activities. On that count, the major contribution of the thesis is twofold. First, it expands knowledge on employee-driven digital innovation by identifying drivers and barriers that organizations need to consider when seeking to increase their innovation-oriented activity. Second, it offers new insights into using hackathons as a method of facilitating employee-driven digital innovation. Both the theoretical and practical contributions of the thesis can serve as starting points for academics and practitioners who want to delve deeper into the phenomenon of employee-driven digital innovation.
With the evolution of digital technology, there has been increased development of new products that are co-created by the user. Studies have shown the presence of an “originator effect”, which increases consumers’ purchase intentions by informing them that the new product was ideated by a user when it is marketed. However, there has been insufficient research on the boundary conditions under which this effect is lost. In this study, two evaluations were conducted to explore the impact of a difference in regulatory focus on the boundary conditions of the originator effect, using regulatory focus theory. These evaluations were performed for promotion-focused products of high complexity and for prevention-focused advertising messages for products of low complexity. The results revealed that the originator effect was maintained even for highly complex products, for which it is possible that this effect may be lost. A negative interaction effect was found between prevention-focused advertising messages and user-ideated information for low-complexity products.
This research focuses on the parasocial relationship space enabled by the Thai Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurants’ fan pages (Facebook) and their customers. Parasocial interaction is triggered by the stimuli of the marketing arm of the restaurant chain and its employees, by engaging the customers in an attempt to create favorable performances. An S-O-R (Stimuli-Organism-Response) model is introduced to capture the holistic configuration of the phenomena of social interaction, which addresses the research objective, while the details of the nature of the phenomena answer the three research questions being raised. In particular, this research contributes to demonstrating the usefulness of netnography, which is effective in enriching the understanding of parasocial interaction that has lacked the rigor and validity in measurements in the existent literature. In addition, this research identifies also the agentic and intentional components of parasocial interaction, which fills the gap in the existent literature. In sum, this research serves both the exploratory and explanatory purposes of the research.
This research acknowledges the exponential development of social media and application-oriented technologies on the Internet that propel marketers to accept the social media-driven brand community as a dominant platform for marketing campaigns and strategy implementation to establish favorable brand equity. To be specific, this research recognizes that consumers select the brand community to fit their identities that fulfil their cognitive and affective gratifications, which in turn benefit the company by enhancing the brand image perception. Specifically, social identity theory is exploited which guides the development of the conceptual model to address the research objective, while netnography-based research method is employed, as an exploratory research effort, to provide a rich picture and understanding of the conceptual model. This research provides numerous contributions to the research, in particular concerning the role of consumer brand identification (CBI) in the value co-creation, as well as the use of the value of co-creation in strengthening brand image, CBI and other sources of CBI such as benefits, emotional attachment, product preferences, and marketing strategies.
Generally, engaged students manifest process-oriented efforts of involvement in learning, cognitively, behaviorally and emotionally. When students are engaged, they reveal better ability to solve problems and higher students’ achievements. This research provides significant insights and demonstrates a good understanding of the nature and the architecture of student engagement and its antecedent personal environmental factors, and consequential values, which is made possible by the use of mix research method. The mixed method involves surveys and netnography. Netnography is a relatively new research method, which involves complete or non-intrusive observation in an online environment. The survey outcomes reveal that student engagement is influenced by both personal and environmental factors, and the significant ones are self-efficacy and belief in job prospects and performance in the personal field. In addition, the relationship between the students themselves and with the teacher, and the parent, and the learning environment and ethical atmosphere are shown to be the significant ones influencing levels of student engagement.
The social media-based brand community engagement is the major focal area for this study which is enabled by Facebook fan pages and Instagram accounts of twelve dominant wedding services providers in Thailand and their customers. The social media-based brand community engagement is elicited by both customers and the brand. Brands participating in the attempts to stimulate brand community engagement by employing the business model characteristics factors via the relevant sense channels while the customers are driven by the personal motive and values. Social media-based brand community engagement is an attempt to create values that lead to customer loyalty and, in turn, enable customer advocacy in community engagement respectively. A conceptual framework manifests the holistic phenomena of brand community engagement configuration and depicts the areas for marketing implication that address the research objective. Meanwhile, three research questions are raised accordingly. This research is both exploratory and explanatory in nature. While netnography method is exploited in data collection, the grounded theory approach is employed to deliver data analysis of validity, reliability and analytical generalizability.
There is a growing trend of organizations deploying online user innovation communities (UIC) to collect innovative ideas from customers or users. When users submit a large number of ideas, screening and reviewing those ideas becomes a cumbersome task. Prior research indicates that, in a UIC, the popularity of an idea is one of the critical factors for getting recognition amidst a large number of ideas. There exists a lack of clarity on how an idea becomes popular in a UIC. Therefore, drawing on the theoretical underpinnings of cognitive overload theory, we develop a conceptual model to help firms understand how the text characteristics of an idea can be a determining force in making it popular. In particular, we study the effect of an idea's length, breadth, and textual dissimilarity to previously submitted ideas, on the likelihood of receiving comments and votes, which constitutes idea popularity. Our model is validated through logistic regression, using secondary data on 5283 users' ideas collected from the online UIC of the Starbucksmyidea platform. We find a significant impact of these characteristics on idea popularity. Implications for theory and practice are discussed for the effective functioning of UIC platforms.
The concept of customer cocreation has emerged as a key advantage for companies wishing to maintain or gain competitiveness. In the Web 2.0 context, bidirectional communication flow creates a conversational environment in which people can share their ideas and opinions with companies and others. This study explored the use of visual interfaces and gamified elements in the development of online platforms for engaging users in providing their opinions. A total of 134 participants were recruited. The findings indicated that the participants’ engagement and experience with a platform influenced their intention to participate in additional cocreation activities in the future and that gamified elements enhanced the participants’ experience with and motivation to engage in cocreation activities. A visual interface in a platform can effectively guide and support users in cocreation activities. Furthermore, gamification can enhance the hedonic value of the cocreation experience and strengthen intention to participate.KeywordsCustomer cocreationEngagement platformGamificationUser experienceVisual-based interface
InnovationInnovation plays a significant role in helping organizationsOrganizations differentiate themselves in the marketplace by establishing a competitive advantageCompetitive advantage. While digital platformsDigital platforms, specifically social mediaSocial media, offer a variety of new possibilities throughout organizationsOrganizations, researchResearch on the nexus of social mediaSocial media and business has focused mostly on those applications of social mediaSocial media that increase sales and profitability. One issue that has not been adequately studied is the potential of social mediaSocial media to promote innovationInnovation. Therefore, this study aimed to provide an overview of how organizationsOrganizations can integrate social mediaSocial media in their innovationInnovationprocessesProcess and address the related challengesChallenges and opportunitiesOpportunities. The analysis contributes to the academic literature and helps practitioners by providing an overview of social mediaSocial media sources and available data collection and analysis tools and by exploring the various ways in which social mediaSocial media can support innovationInnovation. Finally, five main recommendations are offered for how best to integrate social mediaSocial media into the innovationInnovationprocessProcess.
Hızla değişen modern dünyada, temel sistemlerde uygulanan geleneksel anlayışlar
hızla dönüşmektedir. Bu dönüşümde baş rolde yer olan marka ve tüketici
kavramları da yeni ilişkilerle şekillenmektedir. Kitleden kaynağa doğru evrilen
bu süreçte yeni bir iş birliği modeli olarak kitle kaynak kavramı karşımıza çıkmaktadır.
Gelecekteki süreçleri belirleyecek en önemli yenilik işbirliği olacaktır.
Bu kitap; birlikte yaratma, işbirliği ve açık inovasyon uygulamaları ile geleneksel
yönetim stratejilerini zorlayan ve değiştiren yeni bir iş yapma biçimi ve finansal
model olarak kabul edilen kitle kaynağın şu anki durumuna ilişkin bir bakış açısı
elde etmek amacıyla hazırlanmıştır. Ayrıca kitabın, ileride gerçekleştirilecek farklı
çalışmalarda, bu tür servis sağlayıcıların sistematik bir şekilde değerlendirilmesine
ve kavramsal bir çerçeve oluşturulmasına katkı sunması amaçlanmaktadır.
As the digital shift in society affects both private and public organizations, the role of digital innovation is critical if digital transformations are to succeed. Research has developed models to explain how digital innovation affects organizations and societies. During the last ten years, employee-driven innovation has emerged as a new approach to explain innovation. Through this systematic literature review, we offer insight into the intersection between employee-driven innovation and digital innovation, and we coin the term employee-driven digital innovation. We review 58 studies published at this research intersection since 2010. The findings show a research field of growing interest that is divided into two main streams of research, one focused on the outcomes of employee-driven digital innovation and the other on the use of digital tools to support employee-driven innovation processes. We describe this research area, identify critical research gaps and propose future research directions.
Participation in sponsored online co-creation is said to be driven primarily by an individual’s intrinsic motivation, which in turn may be crowded-out, or undermined by financial incentives. The effect of financial incentives, specifically in a company-sponsored online co-creation brainstorming (COCB) context, however, remains unexplored. In this study, we use LEGO Ideas, a prominent COCB, as an exemplar and employ a between-subjects randomized experimental design to examine the effect of different types of financial incentives on intrinsic motivation’s impact on participation intention in a COCB context, either directly or indirectly through personal innovativeness in the domain of information technology. Our findings suggest that focused financial incentives, representing situations where financial rewards are administered exclusively on the basis of excellent performance, offer the best outcome for predicting participation intention. These findings contribute to our knowledge of the use of financial incentives in sponsored online co-creation generally, and specifically in COCBs.
Purpose
With the rapid development of web-based ideation platforms, firms are increasingly reaching outside their boundaries to obtain ideas, which makes idea evaluation tricky and ineffective. Numerous studies have investigated the antecedents of idea quality, but few have focused on the fragmented and contradictory conclusions these studies have drawn. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to disentangle conflicting findings regarding factors affecting idea quality.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 41 independent samples from 40 articles published between 2009 and 2020 were retrieved and encoded to conduct a meta-analysis. By using Comprehensive Meta-analysis 3.0 (CMA 3.0) software, the relationship between identified influencing factors and idea quality, and the moderating effects of potential variables were investigated.
Findings
Factors affecting idea quality were summarized and divided into three categories: idea-related factors, ideator-related factors and platform-related factors. The results indicated that all proposed factors (idea length, supporting evidence, past success, past submissions, past comments, votes received and comments received) had significant positive effects on idea quality. Moreover, the measurement of idea quality and idea type was the causative factor for the inconsistent findings, whereas the moderating effect of platform type was not significant.
Originality/value
This study systematically synthesized the existing research on the factors influencing idea quality and helped to reconcile the mixed results. The findings serve to enrich current knowledge of idea evaluation in the online context, which could have important implications for both scholars and practitioners.
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the effects of design sources (user design vs. company design) on customers’ perceived value (perceived self-improvement and perceived uncertainty) and consequently purchase intention, as well as the moderating effect of brand strength in the context of purchasing utilitarian products.
Design/methodology/approach
Two studies were conducted. Study 1 used a laboratory experiment (n = 160) to test the effects of design sources on perceived self-improvement, perceived uncertainty and purchase intention. Study 2 used an online experiment (n = 312) to examine the moderating effect of brand strength.
Findings
The results showed that user design is a double-edged sword for companies. Compared with company design, user design is associated with stronger self-improvement and uncertainty as perceived by customers. Perceived self-improvement is positively related to purchase intention, while perceived uncertainty undermines purchase intention. Moreover, for weak brands, perceived self-improvement is significantly stronger in user design than company design, while for strong brands, this relationship is not significant.
Originality/value
This paper draws on mental accounting theory to study the perceived benefits and risks of user design of utilitarian products, and highlights the double-edged effects of user design on customers’ perceived value and purchase decision. The findings provide more rounded insights on user design of utilitarian products, complementing the one-sided view of customers’ positive perceives of user design in unclassified product categories.
Purpose
This paper aims to verify co-creation behavior and understand a relationship between perception of service quality, loyalty and co-creation, from Starbucks customers' perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
A quantitative methodology was carried out, operationalized by applying a questionnaire to a sample of 385 respondents.
Findings
The results showed that service quality has a positive impact on loyalty and co-creation behavior in all its aspects; loyalty can be considered an important attribute in the intention of co-creation by customers.
Originality/value
This research extends the current knowledge on the subject and examines the associations between other attributes discussed. The implications of the study suggest strategic directions for using the clients' co-creation as a competitive alternative and generating value.
This study aims to investigate the influence of presentation and sentiment orientation of user-generated ideas and reviews on idea adoption in open innovation communities (OICs). Drawing on the social influence theory, this study develops a research model that divides idea components into informational and normative determinants. The sentiment orientation of the idea title, description, and associated reviews is determined using a lexicon-based sentiment analysis approach. The research model is empirically tested using logistic regression analysis based on a dataset from the Microsoft community for business analytics products. The results reveal that the sentiment orientation of idea title has a negative influence on idea adoption, whilst the sentiment orientation of description has no influence on idea adoption. The sentiment orientation of the associated reviews has a positive influence on idea adoption, and this influence is moderated by the number of reviews. In addition, both idea title length and description length have a positive influence on idea adoption. These results offer several theoretical and practical implications and should therefore contribute to a better understanding of how user-generated ideas can be leveraged to drive innovation development and sustainability in OICs.
Purpose
Online user innovation community (OUIC) has become a vital source for enterprises to obtain user innovation ideas and interact with users in new product development. However, most studies only focus on the relationship between users and ideas, often ignoring the influence of employees in the innovation platform. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of employee behaviors on idea quality in OUIC.
Design/methodology/approach
In this paper, the authors collected sample data of open user innovation community – Idea Exchange – and then, the authors examined the direct roles of employee’s idea generation behaviors and idea promotion behaviors on idea quality and the moderating roles of social networks position and enthusiasm by using binary logistic regression model.
Findings
Results indicated that employee’s idea generation behaviors and idea promotion behaviors have a positive influence on users’ idea quality. Also, the social network position and characteristics show the moderation effect of employee behavior and idea quality.
Originality/value
This study is different from prior studies because it emphasizes the role of employees in the open source platform. The findings suggest that enterprises and platform managers pay more attention to the impact of employees and improve the quality of ideas and promote the development of OUIC.
Purpose
This study aims to predict popular contributors through text representations of user-generated content in open crowds.
Design/methodology/approach
Three text representation approaches – count vector, Tf-Idf vector, word embedding and supervised machine learning techniques – are used to generate popular contributor predictions.
Findings
The results of the experiments demonstrate that popular contributor predictions are considered successful. The F 1 scores are all higher than the baseline model. Popular contributors in open crowds can be predicted through user-generated content.
Research limitations/implications
This research presents brand new empirical evidence drawn from text representations of user-generated content that reveals why some contributors' ideas are more viral than others in open crowds.
Practical implications
This research suggests that companies can learn from popular contributors in ways that help them improve customer agility and better satisfy customers' needs. In addition to boosting customer engagement and triggering discussion, popular contributors' ideas provide insights into the latest trends and customer preferences. The results of this study will benefit marketing strategy, new product development, customer agility and management of information systems.
Originality/value
The paper provides new empirical evidence for popular contributor prediction in an innovation crowd through text representation approaches.
Canceling ideas and projects is an important part of the Innovation Portfolio Management (IPM) process as stopping the unsuccessful ones avoids sunk costs and sets free resources for successful ideas and projects. A large body of literature is available on the decision making in IPM. In this study, we analyzed within IPM the cancellation of ideas and projects by gatekeeping boards as well as the possibilities of applying machine learning. The hypotheses were tested with data from three large European telecommunication organizations. In total the three organizations shared 9,118 canceled ideas and projects of which 0.3% was canceled in the gatekeeping boards. 2.7% of the 1,469 gate requests on the agenda of these boards were canceled. The dataset of one organization was used to train four machine learning models to predict the likelihood of idea and project cancellation. The first model is trained to predict the ideas that will be canceled before the first gate approval, the second model does the same for projects being canceled after the first gate is approved but before the second gate is approved. Models three and four are trained for projects in a later phase. The fourth model predicts the cancellation of projects that hold a go on implementation approval. All four hold a high area under the curve of at least 0.802 turning them into possibly valuable instruments for predicting project cancellation.
With the development of technology, e-commerce became an essential part of an individual’s life, where individuals could easily purchase and sell products over the internet. However, fraud attempts; specifically credit card fraudulent attacks are rapidly increasing. Cards may potentially be stolen; fake records are being used and credit cards are subject to being hacked. Artificial Intelligence techniques tackle these credit card fraud attacks, by identifying patterns that predict false transactions. Both Machine Learning and Deep Learning models are used to detect and prevent fraud attacks. Machine Learning techniques provide positive results only when the dataset is small and do not have complex patterns. In contrast, Deep Learning deals with huge and complex datasets. However, most of the existing studies on Deep Learning have used private datasets, and therefore, did not provide a broad comparative study. This paper aims to improve the detection of credit card fraud attacks using Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM RNN) with a public dataset. Our proposed model proved to be effective. It achieved an accuracy rate of 99.4% which is higher compared to other existing Machine and Deep Learning techniques.
Resumo As ideias são consideradas a matéria-prima do processo de inovação. Boas ideias podem impactar no planejamento de ações de melhoria contínua e na promoção de produtos diferenciados. O conhecimento envolvido no domínio de Gestão de Ideias é geralmente latente e deve ser descoberto de forma adequada usando métodos quantitativos, como a mineração de dados ou abordagens baseadas em dados. O grande desafio está em gerar ideias pragmáticas e úteis para o desenvolvimento de novos produtos, faltando pesquisas para desenvolver completamente novos serviços ou ideias de produtos utilizando abordagens quantificadas ou orientadas a dados. Com o intuito de conceber um sistema para sustentação e facilitação deste processo é necessário formalizar os principais conhecimentos envolvidos no domínio. A representação e a formalização do conhecimento podem ocorrer semanticamente. O objetivo deste estudo é propor um modelo de mineração de ideias, capaz de contribuir na análise e interpretação dos dados, com o intuito de auxiliar no processo de tomada de decisão.
This article evaluates when a user-design approach is and is not effective in strengthening brand preference. It specifically delves into the role of power-distance beliefs in influencing preferences for user-designed products and brands. The authors demonstrate that low-power-distance consumers prefer user-designed products to company-designed products, whereas this effect is attenuated or reversed for high-power-distance consumers. The authors find process evidence that both feelings of empowerment and values of expertise differentially mediate brand preferences depending on power-distance beliefs, thus extending prior research findings. Field experiments conducted in the United States and cross-culturally (Austria and Guatemala) with Facebook’s advertising platform provide convergent evidence using country and political orientation as managerially accessible proxies. This research sheds light on when and why firms should be wary of user-design approaches, based on how power-distance beliefs drive consumers’ preferences.
Digital platforms offer new ways for organizations to collaborate with the external environment for ideas, technologies, and knowledge. They provide new possibilities and competence but they also bring new challenges for organizations. Understanding the role of these platforms in digital transformation is crucial. This study aims at exploring how organizations are driven towards transformation in various ways to embrace digital platforms for ideas, technologies, and knowledge. It shows the opportunities and challenges digital platforms bring in for the organizations. It also highlights underlying mechanisms and potential outcomes of various digital platforms. The contribution of the submission is valuable for scholars to understand and further explore this area. It provides insight for practitioners to capture value through digital platforms and accelerate the pace of organizations’ digital transformation.
Cisco Systems has plenty of experience developing new technology internally; it has also proved adept at growing its product offerings through targeted acquisitions of tech start-ups. Not too long ago, the company began running an internal innovation competition, offering cash rewards for the best new product ideas. After a few years, though, Cisco sought to reach beyond its walls to see what sorts of ideas - and different perspectives - the wider world had to offer. In late 2007, it announced the I-Prize competition. The goal was to build a new billion-dollar Cisco business around the winning idea to emerge from among many outside contributions. The contest called for an idea that would align with Cisco's strategy and take advantage of its leadership position in internet technology. A total of more than 2,500 people from 104 countries registered on the I-Prize website and submitted more than 1,200 ideas. After a challenging, nearly year long process of winnowing and evaluation, an in-house judging panel chose an idea for creating a "smart" electricity grid - a natural fit with Cisco's competencies and long-term strategy. In this article, I-Prize impresario Jouret, chief technology officer of Cisco's Emerging Technologies Group, describes the experience of dealing with the unexpected complexities - and labor-intensiveness - of crowdsourcing: "The misconception about crowdsourcing is that merely by turning on a webste and putting up a reward, in no time you'll have recipes for cold fusion by the bucket load. That's not what happens."
Improvements in the standard of living depend to a remarkable degree on the success of industrial innovations, but the odds of any one idea becoming an economic success are so very low that many ideas are needed. Success curves for industrial innovation have been developed from three major sources, including: the project literature, patent literature and experience, and venture capitalists. Remarkably similar results were found from all three sources of information.
Understanding success curves is important for at least three reasons: 1. To set expectations of those involved in industrial innovation; 2. To benchmark one's own process against others in the industry; and, 3. To calculate future expected benefits from current innovation spending as a function of the stage of the new product development process and the typical success rates found for each stage.
Open innovation intermediaries are increasingly growing and changing the technology market profoundly. Especially in last 10 years, intermediaries have rapidly emerged in technology markets. Companies utilize intermediaries to search and solve innovation problems. The extant literature has very limited studies on intermediaries despite their crucial roles in the technology market. The objective of this study to explore the open innovation intermediary market and how intermediaries differ in their strategies despite they are being in the same industry; the particular emphasis is given on the best practices, effectiveness, characteristics, challenges, and market implications, etc. Five prominent intermediary case companies are considered in the study. Intermediary market for innovation is mostly prevailing in a few advanced countries even though various technologies are distributed globally. There are no well-established theories and models how to organize the intermediary market in practice. Consequently, intermediary market demands further studies to build theories and models. This study is an effort towards building theories and models for intermediary market.
The Idea Management Systems are a tool for collecting ideas for innovation from large communities. One of the problems of those systems is the difficulty to accurately depict the distinctive features of ideas in a rapid manner and use them for judgement of proposed innovations. Our research aims to solve this problem by introducing annotation of ideas with a domain independent taxonomy that describes various characteristics of ideas. The findings of our study show that such annotations can be successfully transformed into new metrics that allow the comparison of ideas with similar successfulness as the metrics already used in Idea Management Systems but in greater detail. The presented results are based on experiments with over 50,000 ideas gathered from case studies of four different organisations: Dell, Starbucks, Cisco and Canonical.
In the Web 2.0 era, business models have changed. This study explores the current use of the Web 2.0 phenomenon crowdsourcing as an avenue for idea generation and decision making. Crowdsourcing is a way of outsourcing tasks to communities of Internet users, typically for little or no compensation. It has been used in Haiti and Kenya to minimize the impact of natural disasters and political turmoil, by scholars to translate ancient texts, by notfor- profits to increase donations and awareness of their causes, and by large corporations such as Proctor & Gamble, Boeing, Toyota, and BP to generate ideas for products, advertisements, and to help solve business problems (Mullins, 2010; Falcioni, 2010; Cohen, 2010; Strom, 2010; Whitla, 2009). This article will focus on current organizational uses of crowdsourcing, along with an analysis of the pros and cons of its use in decision making. Suggestions for companies considering its use will be given to help them avoid the mistakes that others have made in the past.
To attract and to commit users to participate in online open innovation communities it is important to know the motivations of the members and ways to enhance commitment. One way to motivate members to participate is to reward them by monetary or non-monetary rewards. In this study we focus on studying the role of rewarding in online open innovation intermediaries. The data was collected by interviews of maintainers and a web survey in three intermediaries as well as by reviewing rewarding mechanisms in twelve open innovation intermediaries. In the studied communities respondents found monetary rewarding important. Also non-monetary rewarding based on quality of ideas in form of ranking lists on the website was found important as well as acknowledging the highest quality answers. According to the maintainers' interviews combinations of monetary and non-monetary rewarding was important. The review of existing communities rewarding mechanisms indicated that both rewarding methods are currently used in many open innovation intermediaries.
From Apple to Merck to Wikipedia, more and more organizations are turning to crowds for help in solving their most vexing innovation and research questions, but managers remain understandably cautious. It seems risky and even unnatural to push problems out to vast groups of strangers distributed around the world, particularly for companies built on a history of internal innovation. How can intellectual property be protected? How can a crowd-sourced solution be integrated into corporate operations? What about the costs? These concerns are all reasonable, the authors write, but excluding crowdsourcing from the corporate innovation tool kit means losing an opportunity. After a decade of study, they have identified when crowds tend to outperform internal organizations (or not). They outline four ways to tap into crowd-powered problem solving--contests, collaborative communities, complementors, and labor markets--and offer a system for picking the best one in a given situation. Contests, for example, are suited to highly challenging technical, analytical, and scientific problems; design problems; and creative or aesthetic projects. They are akin to running a series of independent experiments that generate multiple solutions--and if those solutions cluster at some extreme, a company can gain insight into where a problem's "technical frontier" lies. (Internal R&D may generate far less information.)
Research has shown that many innovations originate not in the manufacturer but the user domain. Internet-based toolkits for idea competitions (TIC) are a novel way for manufacturers to access innovative ideas and solutions from users. Idea competitions build on the nature of competition as a means to encourage users to participate at an open innovation process, to inspire their creativity, and to increase the quality of the submissions. When the contest ends, submissions are evaluated by an expert panel. Users whose submissions score highest receive an award from the manufacturer, which is often granted in exchange for the right to exploit the solution in its domain. Following the idea of evolutionary prototyping, we developed a TIC in cooperation with a manufacturer of sports goods. The TIC was launched as a pilot in one of the company's markets. Submissions were evaluated using the consensual assessment technique. The evaluation of this study provides suggestions for further research, but also implications for managers willing to explore TIC in their organization.
Fuelled by increased interest among organizations to team up with their customers, technologies for supporting open innovation are emerging. In this paper, we explore how current technologies are designed to support open innovation, in order to envision future developments and research challenges. A sample of 51 systems has been classified. Surprisingly, we found that most technologies for open innovation are not very innovative because they provide similar features. Typically, users are asked to suggest ideas or solve predefined problems in collaboration with others. By drawing on our review, we identified four types of open innovation systems: idea management system, problem solving system, marketplace system and innovation analysis system. In conclusion, we noted that a key challenge for research and practice is to gain a deeper understanding of how collaboration technologies can be connected with more sophisticated opportunities for reflection and analysis.
In this paper, we address the pre-project phase of idea generation in the product innovation process, where the effective generation of new product ideas still remains an issue of high relevance for both management scholars and practitioners. We relate Nonaka and colleagues’ four knowledge creation modes of socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization to the novelty of product ideas generated. Taking a behavioral perspective on the four modes, we posit positive relationships between socialization as well as internalization and the novelty of product ideas, whereas we postulate negative relationships for externalization as well as combination. Using data from multiple respondents in 33 companies, our results confirm the proposed linkages.
Web 2.0 technologies present an opportunity for firms to create online communities where users engage in value creation by submitting product reviews, providing feedback, suggesting ideas, and identifying new sources of innovation. Our research suggests that there are four major challenges associated with successfully integrating an online user community into an organization's innovation processes: understanding the ideas posted, identifying the best ideas, balancing the needs of transparency with the community against disclosure to competitors, and sustaining the community. In this article, we analyze specific aspects of these four challenges that became evident during the first 18 months of Dell IdeaStorm, Dell Computer Corporation's online user innovation community. We describe the recommendations that we initially posted on Dell's site for improving IdeaStorm and the responses we received. The article concludes with seven recommendations for how to overcome these challenges, which we believe can be used by other firms to leverage user innovation communities using an open model with social media tools.
In this paper, we argue that the ability of a firm to recognize the value of new, external information, assimilate it, and apply it to commercial ends is critical to its innovative capabilities. We label this capability a firm's absorptive capacity and suggest that it is largely a function of the firm's level of prior related knowledge. The discussion focuses first on the cognitive basis for an individual's absorptive capacity including, in particular, prior related knowledge and diversity of background. We then characterize the factors that influence absorptive capacity at the organizational level, how an organization's absorptive capacity differs from that of its individual members, and the role of diversity of expertise within an organization. We argue that the development of absorptive capacity, and, in turn, innovative performance are history- or path-dependent and argue how lack of investment in an area of expertise early on may foreclose the future development of a technical capability in that area. We formulate a model of firm investment in research and development (R&D), in which R&D contributes to a firm's absorptive capacity, and test predictions relating a firm's investment in R&D to the knowledge underlying technical change within an industry. Discussion focuses on the implications of absorptive capacity for the analysis of other related innovative activities, including basic research, the adoption and diffusion of innovations, and decisions to participate in cooperative R&D ventures.
'Crowdsourcing' is a relatively recent concept that encompasses many practices. This diversity leads to the blurring of the limits of crowdsourcing that may be identified virtually with any type of internet-based collaborative activity, such as co-creation or user innovation. Varying definitions of crowdsourcing exist, and therefore some authors present certain specific examples of crowdsourcing as paradigmatic, while others present the same examples as the opposite. In this article, existing definitions of crowdsourcing are analysed to extract common elements and to establish the basic characteristics of any crowdsourcing initiative. Based on these existing definitions, an exhaustive and consistent definition for crowdsourcing is presented and contrasted in 11 cases.
Integrating the customer in the innovation process is believed to be a powerful means to reduce failure rates and to increase the revenue from new products. Although many companies have launched programmes to enable such integration, the understanding of the mechanisms behind successful programmes remains limited. Furthermore, the benefit of integrating customers in the innovation process has to be weighed against the costs. Virtual customer integration has been discussed as a way to limit these costs and bring the benefits of potentially unlimited scalability. Using a sample of the Euro Stoxx 50 companies, we shed light on the various types of virtual customer integration platforms, their limitations, their benefits and the mechanisms that have to be put in place to make them succeed. Results indicate that only a limited number of platforms go beyond the sourcing of ideas. Especially the integration of the customer in the execution phase of the innovation process remains largely limited to digital goods.
Distributed innovation systems are an approach to organizing for innovation that seems to meet the challenge of accessing knowledge that resides outside the boundaries of any one organization. We provide an overview of distributed innovation systems that are achieving success in three different industries. We explore why people participate, the organizing principles of production, and the implications for intellectual property policy. Finally, the potential extensions and limitations of this alternative model of innovation are considered.
Corporate innovation management geared to long-term success calls for a strategy to grow innovations into a substantial competitive advantage. This, however, coincides with an enormous failure-rate at the market, especially in the field of breakthrough innovations. Hence, in recent times, companies are trying to alleviate the risk of lacking user-acceptance through opening their innovation processes to external actors, particularly customers. The method of integrating lead users is determined by the effective and systematic identification of leading-edge customers, which is considered to be a critical phase within this approach. With the arrival of Web 2.0 applications, there is a huge potential to improve these selection processes. Our research into online communities and weblogs scrutinised the search criteria in an online environment and revealed the following characteristics as crucial factors for the online identification of lead users: being ahead of a market trend, high expected benefits, user expertise and motivation, extreme user needs as well as opinion leadership and an online commitment.
Companies are used to bringing in customers to participate in focus groups, usability laboratories, and market research surveys in order to help in the development of new products and services. And for improving products that customers know well, those tools are highly sophisticated. For example, knowledgeable customers are adept at identifying the specific scent of leather they expect in a luxury vehicle or at helping to tune the sound of a motorcycle engine to just the timbre that evokes feelings of power. But to go beyond improvements to the familiar, companies need to identify and meet needs that customers may not yet recognize. To accomplish that task, a set of techniques called empathic design can help. Rather than bring the customers to the company, empathic design calls for company representatives to watch customers using products and services in the context of their own environments. By doing so, managers can often identify unexpected uses for their products, just as the product manager of a cooking oil did when he observed a neighbor spraying the oil on the blades of a lawn mower to reduce grass buildup. They can also uncover problems that customers don't mention in surveys, as the president of Nissan Design did when he watched a couple struggling to remove the backseat of a competitor's minivan in order to transport a couch. The five-step process Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey Rayport describe in detail is a relatively low-cost, low-risk way to identify customer needs, and it has the potential to redirect a company's existing technological capabilities toward entirely new businesses.
Several organizations have developed ongoing crowdsourcing communities that repeatedly collect ideas for new products and services from a large, dispersed "crowd" of nonexperts (consumers) over time. Despite its promises, little is known about the nature of an individual's ideation efforts in such an online community. Studying Dell's IdeaStorm community, serial ideators are found to be more likely than consumers with only one idea to generate an idea the organization finds valuable enough to implement, but they are unlikely to repeat their early success once their ideas are implemented. As ideators with past success attempt to again come up with ideas that will excite the organization, they instead end up proposing ideas similar to their ideas that were already implemented (i.e., they generate less diverse ideas). The negative effects of past success are somewhat mitigated for ideators with diverse commenting activity on others' ideas. These findings highlight some of the challenges in maintaining an ongoing supply of quality ideas from the crowd over time.
Virtual customer communities enable firms to establish distributed innovation models that involve varied customer roles in new product development. In this article I use a multitheoretic lens to examine the design of such virtual customer environments, focusing on four underlying theoretical themes (interaction pattern, knowledge creation, customer motivation, and virtual customer community-new product development team integration) and deriving their implications for virtual customer environment design. I offer propositions that relate specific virtual customer environment design elements to successful customer value creation, and thereby to new product development success.
The use of competition-based processes for the development of innovations is increasing. In parallel with the increasing use of competition-based innovation in business firms, this model of innovation is successfully being used by non-profit organizations for advancing the development of science and technology. One such non-profit organization is the X Prize Foundation, which designs and manages innovation competitions to encourage scientific and technological development. The objective of this article is to analyze the X Prize Foundation and three of the competitions it has organized in order to identify the challenges of competition-based innovation and how to overcome them.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to explore the development of crowdsourcing literature.
Design/methodology/approach
– This study is a comprehensive review of 346 articles on crowdsourcing. Both statistical and contents analyses were conducted in this paper.
Findings
– ISI listed journal articles, non-ISI listed journal articles and conference articles have had nearly the same contribution in crowdsourcing literature. Articles published in non-ISI listed journals have had an essential role in the initial theory development related to crowdsourcing. Scholars from the USA have authored approximately the same number of articles as scholars from all the European countries combined. Scholars from developing countries have been more relatively active in authoring conference articles than journal articles. Only very recently, top-tier journals have engaged in publishing on crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing has proven to be beneficial in many tasks, but the extant literature does not give much help to practitioners in capturing value from crowdsourcing. Despite understanding that the motivations of crowds are crucial when planning crowdsourcing activities, the various motivations in different contexts have not been explored sufficiently. A major concern has been the quality and accuracy of information that has been gathered through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing bears a lot of unused potential. For example, it can increase employment opportunities to low-income people in developing countries. On the other hand, more should be known of fair ways to organize crowdsourcing so that solution seekers do not get a chance to exploit individuals committing to provide solutions.
Research limitations/implications
– The literature included in the study is extensive, but an all-inclusive search for articles was limited to only nine selected publishers. However, in addition to the articles retrieved from the nine selected publishers, 52 highly cited articles were also included from other publishers.
Practical implications
– Crowdsourcing has much unused potential, and the use of crowdsourcing is increasing rapidly. The study provides a thematic review of various applications of crowdsourcing.
Originality/value
– The study is the first of its kind to explore the development of crowdsourcing literature, discussing the loci and foci of extant articles and listing applications of crowdsourcing. Successful applications of crowdsourcing include idea generation, microtasking, citizen science, public participation, wikies, open source software and citizen journalism.
Who provides better inputs to new product ideation tasks, problem solvers with expertise in the area
for which new products are to be developed or problem solvers from “analogous” markets that are
distant but share an analogous problem or need? Conventional wisdom appears to suggest that target market expertise is indispensable, which is why most managers searching for new ideas tend to stay within their own market context even when they do search outside their firms’ boundaries. However, in a unique symmetric experiment that isolates the effect of market origin, we find evidence for the opposite: Although solutions provided by problem solvers from analogous markets show lower potential for immediate use, they demonstrate substantially higher levels of novelty. Also, compared to established novelty drivers, this effect appears highly relevant from a managerial perspective: we find that including problem solvers from analogous markets versus the target market accounts for almost two-thirds of the well-known effect of involving lead users instead of average problem solvers. This effect is further amplified when the analogous distance between the markets increases, i.e., when searching in far versus near analogous markets. Finally, results indicate that the analogous market effect is particularly strong in the upper tail of the novelty distribution, which again underscores the effect’s practical importance. All of this suggests that it might pay to systematically search across firm-external sources of innovation that were formerly out of scope for most managers.
Markets for ideas (MFIs) are virtual marketplaces connecting individuals and organizations selling their ideas (namely knowledge owners) to companies in search for specific innovative solutions (namely knowledge seekers). This phenomenon finds its root in the open innovation paradigm and empirical data clearly demonstrate how its economic importance is constantly growing, as well as the interest paid by academics. Nevertheless, despite their increasing relevance, it remains unclear which are the main dynamics and characteristics of these markets. Therefore, the present paper aims at providing an overview of this specific topic by reviewing and discussing the main findings available in the scientific literature. The analysis of the literature is structured around three main market dimensions – ideas, knowledge owners, and knowledge seekers. In addition, actual examples of MFIs are reported in order to strengthen literature's results. The contribution of this review is threefold. First, it provides an insight into the literature on MFIs, by collecting and describing the main features of ideas, knowledge owners, and knowledge seekers. Second, it presents propositions inferred by the characteristics emerging from the review. Finally, it spots literature gaps and traces new research directions. Hence, the study sheds new light on the main characteristics of MFIs, pointing out several research questions that need to be further addressed by scholars.
Open innovation represents an emergent paradigm by which organizations make use of internal and external resources to drive their innovation processes. The growth of information and communication technologies has facilitated a direct contact with customers and users, which can be organized as open innovation communities through Internet. The main drawback of this scheme is the huge amount of information generated by users, which can negatively affect the correct identification of potentially applicable ideas. This paper proposes the use of evolutionary computation techniques for the identification of innovators, that is, those users with the ability of generating attractive and applicable ideas for the organization. For this purpose, several characteristics related to the participation activity of users though open innovation communities have been collected and combined in the form of discriminant functions to maximize their correct classification. The right classification of innovators can be used to improve the ideas evaluation process carried out by the organization innovation team. Besides, obtained results can also be used to test lead user theory and to measure to what extent lead users are aligned with the organization strategic innovation policies.
Innovation contests as a means to realize innovative product or service solutions are growing in popularity among practitioners and researchers. An increasing number of organizations worldwide have adopted innovation contests, not only for innovation purposes, but also for other reasons such as promoting sustainability. At the same time, innovation contests represent a growing research field to scholars from different backgrounds, e.g., economics or information systems. In this article, first, the growing body of literature on innovation contests is reviewed and classified into five research categories: economic perspective, management perspective, education focus, innovation focus and sustainability focus. Second, some design elements of innovation contests that are central for the understanding, design and management of innovation contests are presented based on the current body of literature. Finally, current research gaps are presented and some of the research questions are developed that could be explored to contribute to the body of literature.
Online crowdsourcing platforms are increasingly used to capture ideas from crowd. Global companies are adopting crowdsourcing idea to connect with and get feedback from the users. The objective of this study was to understand what would motivate people to participate to innovate in online crowdsourcing platform, and to classify different motivational factors and incentives in online crowdsourcing platform. After an extensive literature review on motivation and incentive, different motivational factors and incentives were classified. This study has identified various motivational factors and classified them so that researchers can have more empirical studies to understand better. Moreover, the findings will also be worthwhile for the companies who are planning to launch similar crowdsourcing platforms to tap users' talents.
This study examines the creation of innovation-related knowledge in virtual communities visited mainly by lead users. Such communities enable firms to access a large number of lead users in a cost-efficient way. A propositional framework relates lead users’ characteristics to unique virtual community features to examine their potential impact on the development of valuable innovation knowledge. The authors empirically validate this framework by analyzing online contributions of lead users for mobile service innovation projects. The findings indicate that the value of their contributions stems from their ability to suggest solutions instead of simply describing problems or stating customer needs. Lead users’ technical expertise also makes them particularly well-suited to develop new functionalities, but less so for design and usability improvements. The digital context favors the creation of explicit knowledge that can be easily integrated into the development of new products. Finally, contributions given by lead users in a proactive way contain more novel insights than reactive contributions such as answers to community members’ questions. The findings should help managers stimulate, identify, and improve the use of lead users’ input in virtual communities.
A new model for managing distributed innovation, the community of creation is a governance mechanism for managing innovation that lies between the hierarchybased (closed) mechanism and the market-based (open) mechanism for innovation management. The community-centric model shifts the locus of innovation beyond the boundaries of the firm, to a community of individuals and firms that collaborate to create joint intellectual property. A community of creation requires an identified sponsor, a set of ground rules for participation, and a system for managing intellectual property rights. The community of creation model allows innovation to proceed in a complex environment by striking a balance between order and chaos. This article presents detailed case studies from the computer industry to highlight the differences among the different approaches to innovation management. It also discusses the opportunities and the unresolved issues of the community of creation model for practitioners as well as for academics.
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Although there is increasing acknowledgement that consumers can contribute useful ideas during the development of innovative services, there has been little empirical examination of how such users can best be managed in order to contribute their ideas to the ‘fuzzy front end’ of new service development. The present study examines the relationship between the nature of user-created ideas regarding new technology-based services and the characteristics of the users supplying the ideas. In particular, the study investigates whether users' ideas become more incremental or more radical depending on the users' awareness of technological restrictions and their utilization of use experience. The results show that idea creators with high use experience who are unaware of any technological restrictions tend to produce service ideas that are more radical in nature, whereas idea creators with high use experience who are aware of technological restrictions tend to produce service ideas that are more incremental in nature. The study provides empirical support that, in order to provide innovative ideas, ordinary users involved in ideation must both have a contextual use experience and not be restricted in their ideation by ‘too much’ technology information and restrictions on potential feasibility.
Research from a variety of perspectives has argued that innovation no longer takes place within a single organization, but rather is distributed across multiple stakeholders in a value network. Here we contrast the vertically integrated innovation model to open innovation, user innovation, as well as other distributed processes (cumulative innovation, communities or social production, and co‐creation), while we also discuss open source software and crowdsourcing as applications of the perspectives. We consider differences in the nature of distributed innovation, as well as its origins and its effects. From this, we contrast the predictions of the perspectives on the sources, motivation and value appropriation of external innovation, and thereby provide a framework for the strategic management of distributed innovation.
Generating ideas for new products used to be the exclusive domain of marketers, engineers, and/or designers. Users have only recently been recognized as an alternative source of new product ideas. Whereas some have attributed great potential to outsourcing idea generation to the “crowd” of users (“crowdsourcing”), others have clearly been more skeptical. The authors join this debate by presenting a real-world comparison of ideas actually generated by a firm's professionals with those generated by users in the course of an idea generation contest. Both professionals and users provided ideas to solve an effective and relevant problem in the consumer goods market for baby products. Executives from the underlying company evaluated all ideas (blind to their source) in terms of key quality dimensions including novelty, customer benefit, and feasibility. The study reveals that the crowdsourcing process generated user ideas that score significantly higher in terms of novelty and customer benefit, and somewhat lower in terms of feasibility. However, the average values for feasibility—in sharp contrast to novelty and customer benefit—tended to be relatively high overall, meaning that feasibility did not constitute a narrow bottleneck in this study. Even more interestingly, it is found that user ideas are placed more frequently than expected among the very best in terms of novelty and customer benefit. These findings, which are quite counterintuitive from the perspective of classic new product development (NPD) literature, suggest that, at least under certain conditions, crowdsourcing might constitute a promising method to gather user ideas that can complement those of a firm's professionals at the idea generation stage in NPD.
There is currently a broad awareness of open innovation and its relevance to corporate R&D. The implications and trends that underpin open innovation are actively discussed in terms of strategic, organizational, behavioral, knowledge, legal and business perspectives, and its economic implications. This special issue aims to advance the R&D, innovation, and technology management perspective by building on past and present studies in the field and providing future directions. Recent research, including the papers in this special issue, demonstrates an increasing range of situations where the concept is regarded as applicable. Most research to date has followed the outside-in process of open innovation, while the inside-out process remains less explored. A third coupled process of open innovation is also attracting significant research attention. These different processes show why it is necessary to have a full understanding of how and where open innovation can add value in knowledge-intensive processes. There may be a need for a creative interpretation and adaptation of the value propositions, or business models, in each situation. In other words, there are important implications for new and emerging methods of R&D management.
In the networked world, firms are recognizing the power of the Internet as a platform for co-creating value with customers. We focus on how the Internet has impacted the process of collaborative innovation—a key process in value co-creation. We outline the distinctive capabilities of the Internet as a platform for customer engagement, including interactivity, enhanced reach, persistence, speed, and flexibility, and suggest that firms can use these capabilities to engage customers in collaborative product innovation through a variety of Internet-based mechanisms. We discuss how these mechanisms can facilitate collaborative innovation at different stages of the New Product Development process (back end vs. front end stages) and for differing levels of customer involvement (high reach vs. high richness). We present two detailed exploratory case studies to illustrate the integrated and systematic usage of Internet-based collaborative innovation mechanisms—Ducati from the motorbike industry and Eli Lilly from the pharmaceutical industry. We derive implications for managerial practice and academic research on collaborative innovation.
Accurate marketing research depends on accurate user judgments regarding their needs. However, for very novel products or in product categories characterized by rapid change—such as “high technology” products—most potential users will not have the real-world experience needed to problem solve and provide accurate data to inquiring market researchers. In this paper I explore the problem and propose a solution: Marketing research analyses which focus on what I term the “lead users” of a product or process.
Lead users are users whose present strong needs will become general in a marketplace months or years in the future. Since lead users are familiar with conditions which lie in the future for most others, they can serve as a need-forecasting laboratory for marketing research. Moreover, since lead users often attempt to fill the need they experience, they can provide new product concept and design data as well.
In this paper I explore how lead users can be systematically identified, and how lead user perceptions and preferences can be incorporated into industrial and consumer marketing research analyses of emerging needs for new products, processes and services.
Since Teece's seminal paper explaining who were the gainers from technological innovation, increased globalization and the information and communication technology revolution have brought new ways for firms to organize and appropriate from innovation. A new more open model of innovation suggests that firms can benefit from sources of innovation that stem from outside the firm. The central theme of this paper is how firms try to unlock communities as complementary assets. These communities exist outside firm boundaries beyond ownership or hierarchical control. Because of practices developed by communities to protect their work, firms need to assign individuals to work in these communities in order to gain access to developments and, to an extent, influence the direction of the community. Using network analysis we show that some software firms sponsor individuals to act strategically within a free and open source software (FOSS) community. Firm sponsored individuals interact with more individuals than interact with them, and also they seek to interact with central individuals in the community. However, we can see differences in how individuals interact, depending on whether their affiliation is with a dedicated FOSS firm or an incumbent in the software industry. Apparently, some firm managers believe they need ‘a man on the inside’ to be able to gain access to communities.
Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R
Purpose
This paper aims to provide insights into the development and management of a customer community, informing product innovation and engaging customers in co‐creation of a consumption experience.
Design/methodology/approach
A review of the state of current knowledge about co‐production, co‐creation and customer communities is followed by discussion of the case study methodology. The case history of a leading player in the UK and international “sportkiting” market focuses on product innovation and customer‐community development. Discussion reflects in more detail on the lessons from the case for application of the principles in practice.
Findings
The case company's innovative product development strategy provides the catalyst for co‐creation of a customer experience. Its marketing actions extend beyond product development and innovation to actively co‐creating experiences with customers, fostering a sense of community among users, facilitating communication within that community, acting on the feedback, and continuously developing and maintaining the community relationship.
Research limitations/implications
The company's marketing strategy can be summed up as “customer community leadership”. This paradigm proposes a new role for businesses in sectors where there is a potential to develop and engage communities. It provides a context for the effective facilitation of customer knowledge management, within which marketing intelligence plays a significant role. The findings offer scope for further research into the nature of this phenomenon and its relevance to co‐creation in other industry sectors, and into numerous aspects of the processes and impacts associated with customer communities.
Originality/value
The case contributes to the literature of co‐creation, demonstrating how it has been achieved through a marketing strategy and marketing mix in a particular customer community.
Experts generally solve problems in their fields more effectively than novices because their well-structured, easily activated knowledge allows for efficient search of a solution space. But what happens when a problem requires a broad search for a solution? One concern is that subjects with a large amount of domain knowledge may actually be at a disadvantage, because their knowledge may confine them to an area of the search space in which the solution does not reside. In other words, domain knowledge may act as a mental set, promoting fixation in creative problem-solving attempts. A series of three experiments in which an adapted version of Mednick's (1962) remote associates task was used demonstrates conditions under which domain knowledge may inhibit creative problem solving.
My Starbucks Idea: A Great Failure? http://blog.intotheminds.com/mystarbucksidea-a-great-failure-150-ideas
- P-N Schwab
Schwab, P-N. (2011) My Starbucks Idea: A Great Failure?
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Crowdsourcing: A systematic literature review
- Hossain