What is it about?
Firms increasingly use innovation tournaments to crowdsource innovation ideas from customers. To gauge the success of these innovation tournaments, firms routinely monitor the number of ideas and the number of participants in a tournament. We show that participation intensity has a strong impact on idea quality, over and above these traditional success metrics. We have also shown for the first time that moderator feedback can help firms stimulate such participation intensity. Specifically, we show that "negative feedback" that challenges ideators’ ideas and highlights the “work to be done” is a better driver of idea quality than "positive feedback". However, there is a caveat: firms should provide such feedback earlier rather than later in the tournament.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Our research calls for more attention among firms for the importance of participation intensity in driving the success of innovation tournaments. We suggest that participation intensity should become a behavior to monitor, a metric to report and an outcome to incentivize. Moreover, our findings about the effect of moderator feedback on ideators' engagement in innovation tournaments help firms actively stimulate participation intensity. These insights are important for firms investing in innovation tournaments or other crowdsourcing innovation initiatives.
Perspectives
It was for me a great pleasure to work on this article. First, the diversity in the team is amazing. Four authors with four different nationalities and cultural backgrounds and working from three different locations (Rotterdam, Maryland and Seattle) ensured a very rich collaboration. Second, the questions we address are very pragmatic (how to give feedback to innovators? how to increase their engagement in crowdsourcing innovation initiatives, such as innovation tournaments?). Third, the fact that we conducted an experiment with a real innovation tournament platform and real voluntary participants made the process and insights very exciting. I hope readers are as excited as I am about the topic and that the article stimulates further debate and research on these topics.
Nuno Camacho
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam
It was truly an exciting journey with a team of wonderful members. I appreciate their dedication and insights, which made the entire process so much enjoyable. Conducting longitudinal experiments on a real innovation tournament platform posed many challenges but also offered a great learning and rewarding experience. Our research provides a fresh perspective on how firms are to manage innovation tournaments to drive participants’ engagement. I hope readers discover the article insightful.
Hyoryung Nam
University of Washington Bothell
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Tournaments to Crowdsource Innovation: The Role of Moderator Feedback and Participation Intensity, Journal of Marketing, January 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0022242918809673.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
