Revealing Hidden Treasures: The Crowd’s Evaluation in Organizational Idea Selection
Lisa Wimbauer, Patrick Figge, Carolin Haeussler · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2019
While organizations apply crowdsourcing to search for novel ideas, they tend to select the more familiar ideas generated by the crowd. To overcome this bias in idea selection, our study aims to investigate if crowd’s evaluations are able to complement organizational idea evaluation. We argue that local search leads to differences between crowd and organizational evaluators. In addition to local search, organizational evaluation is constrained when organizations use formal evaluation criteria. We propose that crowd evaluators are able to detect ‘hidden treasures’. Hidden treasures are ideas favored by the crowd, at first sight neglected by organizational evaluators, but years later implemented by the organization. In our analysis, which is based on over 860 crowdsourced ideas and their crowd and organizational evaluation, we first investigate when and why crowd and organizational evaluators have different opinions. Second, we compare the ideas favored by the crowd with projects implemented several years later. Our results suggest that the crowd’s and the organizational favorites differ with regard to idea novelty. We find that 30% of the crowd’s favorites are hidden treasures. Despite their potential, these ideas have first been overlooked by the organization due to being associated with low company fit, low market potential, and high creativity. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on open evaluation and filtering of crowdsourced ideas in general, and the discussion on implementation of external ideas specifically. For practitioners, we provide guidelines supporting organizations to detect these ‘hidden treasures’.