The Effect of Creativity and Prior Entries on Feedback Activity and Comment Valence in Idea Generation Platforms: An Abstract

Crowdsourcing has become an increasingly viable strategy to implement as more firms are increasing the level of consumer participation within their idea generation processes (Bayus 2012; Hoyer et al. 2010). Companies are interested in learning from their customers both on the negative aspects of their products and as well as potential ideas to improve their products (Von Hippel 2005; Fuller 2010). The overall implementation rate of cocreated ideas on these platforms is low (Bayus 2013). Silverberg and Verspagen’s (2007) study revealed that creative ideas have minimal rates of return. In other words, not enough value is generated by these ideas to justify spending the effort on creative ideas. However, their study did not separate the different aspects of creativity as creative ideas can be both novel and useful to an organization (Amabile 1996; Burroughs et al. 2008). By splitting up the different aspects of creativity, we may be able to discover why some ideas attract more feedback activity in comparison to others. In particular, this study focuses on investigating if creative ideas from two separate perspectives, novel and meaningful, through consumer cocreation have impact on feedback activity of other contributors and the valence of the feedbacks in the crowdsourcing community.