Why Do Ideas Get Selected? Idea Selection in an Online Ideation Platform
Michela Beretta · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2015
While current innovation literature focuses on how to generate variation by expanding the choice sets of ideas organizations can work with, little is known about the maturation process occurring after an idea is submitted on an ideation platform - where contributors engage in discussing it - and how this affects its selection. This study addresses this research gap by examining the factors affecting organizations’ decision to select a given idea (or not) for further consideration. I focus on exploring the effect of two key factors which have been quite overlooked by current research: (1) the heterogeneity of contributors to ideas and (2) the characteristics of the ideas themselves. Based on a rich and extensive dataset of 726 ideas and 2925 comments submitted on an online ideation platform of a large Danish firm over the course of 16 months, I employ a probit model to explore the effect of these two factors on the likelihood of an idea being selected. I find evidence to support that both the characteristics of the idea itself and contributors’ diversity contribute to increase the chances of an idea being selected for further consideration. Implications for both innovation management research and practitioners are discussed.