Crowdsourcing is fast emerging as a mainstream innovation channel for companies. It seems like the crowd has an answer to all sorts of innovation problems – they can come up with ideas for new toys and generate solutions to pressing scientific challenges. In theory, the crowd holds tremendous potential: A large, diverse group of people, consisting of experts and others from all over the world, should have fresh perspectives to bring about breakthrough insights on a given problem.
Why Crowdsourcing Often Leads to Bad Ideas
And what to do about it.
December 13, 2019
Summary.
Most crowdsourcing initiatives end up with an overwhelming amount of useless ideas. Dealing with a full submission box is not only extremely time consuming and costly, it also biases how ideas are selected: When firms receive too many ideas, they tend to focus on ideas that are already familiar to them, defeating the entire purpose of crowdsourcing, which is to surface new thinking. Why do many crowdsourced ideas turn out so bad, and what can firms do about it? Recent research finds that it comes down to understanding the motivations of crowd members.