Encouraging “Outside- the- box” Thinking in Crowd Innovation Through Identifying Domains of Expertise
Lixiu Yu, Aniket Kittur, Robert E. Kraut · 2016
People are more creative at solving difficult design problems when they use relevant examples from outside of the problem's domain as inspirations. However, finding such “outside-the-box” inspirations is difficult, particularly in large idea repositories such as the web, because without guidance people select domains to search based on surface similarity to the problem's domain. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach in which non-experts identify domains that have the potential to yield useful and non-obvious inspirations for solutions. We report an empirical study demonstrating how crowds can generate domains of expertise and that showing people an abstract representation rather than the original problem helps them identify more distant domains. Crowd workers drawing inspirations from the distant domains produced more creative solutions to the original problem than did those who sought inspiration on their own, or drew inspiration from domains closer to or not sharing structural correspondence with the original problem.