Idea evaluation in open, “democratized” innovation

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The proposed research program focuses on the evaluation of ideas for new products or processes. After much focus on idea creation, the importance of idea evaluation is increasingly recognized in research and practice. Any mode of organizing for innovation can only succeed if ideas are effectively vetted such that ultimately the best ideas are selected for implementation.To date, a few papers investigate idea evaluation in organizations, with particular focus on idea evaluation biases and how to counteract them. This research program seeks to uncover new sources of idea evaluation bias and explain mechanisms, moderators, and consequences. In two projects, we investigate potential biases produced by the relative hierarchical position, social ties, and social comparison between idea creators and evaluators. The third project examines new antecedents of whether agents will select into contributing idea evaluations in the first place. The fourth project investigates the consequences of idea evaluation, particularly negative evaluation, on idea creators’ future engagement. The research program analyzes idea evaluation in the context of innovation communities both inside firms and outside, in the customer domain. The reasons are twofold: First, idea evaluations are directly observable in such contexts. E.g. in enterprise crowdfunding, employees allocate funds to ideas advanced by their colleagues, thus making their endorsement explicit. Second, the context is interesting per se, as "open Evaluation" can help companies cope with the flood of ideas created in open innovation communities.The research program uses large quantities of archival data from such communities (e.g. at Siemens, Hyve, and Lufthansa Systems) combined with other firm data, surveys and lab experiments. As a rule, the approach is hypothetico-deductive.The proposed program can make a unique, multi¬pronged, innovative contribution to research and practice. It spans the disciplinary boundary between management and economics, leveraging the applicant’s embeddedness in both domains. It builds on, and seeks to contribute to, the literatures on idea evaluation and open innovation in management, and the private provisioning of public goods in economics. To the idea evaluation literature, it contributes by identifying new sources of evaluation bias, uncovering their contingencies, and revealing the consequences of evaluation on future engagement. To the open innovation literature, it contributes by elucidating the effectual design of evaluation systems on open innovation platforms. Finally, translating findings from management research whereby selective benefits crucially drive private contributions to digital public goods (e.g. innovation communities) to economics, we conceptualize and test the idea of dynamic mpcr (marginal per capita return). This opens a new direction of inquiry embracing key principles of public goods provisioning in the digital age.