The social process of innovation: The role of novelty and social cues in idea evaluation

拟议的研究项目旨在推动创新研究。我们希望推进创新过程中一个重要但尚未充分研究的阶段的理解：对创新想法的评估。为了理解为什么有些想法会得到支持，而另一些想法却得不到支持，我们将重点关注（1）想法新奇的作用和（2）社会线索在想法评估过程中的作用。为了提供管理者评价创意的因果关系证据，我们将在两个组织内进行两个实地实验，让员工提出创新创意，让高级管理者评价并决定实施。我们的研究项目将采用联合收割机定性和定量相结合的方法，分三个步骤进行。第一步是在两个组织内进行定性的预先研究，我们将在其中进行实地试验。我们进行预研究，以获得更好的背景下了解公司的创新过程，这将有助于我们设计有效和适当的实验干预措施。在第二步中，我们将收集员工的想法，并通过主题建模来衡量他们的新奇;这是一种源于计算机科学的文本分析方法，可用于基于描述想法的实际文本来衡量想法的新奇。在第三步中，我们将进行实地实验，分析新奇和社会线索在想法评估过程中的作用。为此，我们将通过实验改变管理者评估提议的想法的条件。虽然评估和选择想法已成为成功创新的关键方面，但对想法评估过程的研究仍在发展中，远未完成。通过拟议的研究，我们寻求在三个方面推进文献。首先，现场实验研究设计，使我们能够提供因果关系的证据的影响，想法的新奇性和社会线索的想法评价。大多数先前的研究都提出了基于相关性的证据，因此没有达到这一“黄金标准”。其次，我们通过基于描述一个想法的实际文本来衡量想法的新奇性，做出了重要的方法论贡献。早期的研究在很大程度上依赖于使用预先建立的图式（如专利类别）来衡量组合新奇。相比之下，我们将采用主题建模来获得基于内容的新奇度量。第三，我们通过并行研究社会关系和内容的影响来推进创新研究。鉴于网络创新研究被批评为缺乏对内容的考虑，内容研究与社会结构脱节，我们寻求整合社会关系和内容。拟议的项目将推进关于想法新奇和社会线索的理论，并将计算机科学的方法与能够进行因果推理的现场实验设计相结合，推动研究前沿。

The proposed research project seeks to push the study of innovation. We look to advance the understanding of an important, yet understudied, phase of the innovation process: the evaluation of ideas proposed for innovation. To understand why some ideas gain support while others do not, we will focus on (1) the role of idea novelty and (2) the role of social cues in the idea evaluation process. As we intend to provide causal evidence on how managers evaluate ideas, we will conduct two field experiments within two organizations where employees generate ideas for innovation and senior managers evaluate them and decide on their implementation.Our research project will combine qualitative and quantitative methods and will proceed in three steps. The first step is a qualitative pre-study within the two organizations in which we will conduct the field experiments. We conduct the pre-study to gain a better contextual understanding of the companies’ innovation processes, and it will help us to design effective and appropriate experimental interventions. In the second step, we will collect the employees’ ideas and measure their novelty by topic modeling; a text-analytic method stemming from computer science that can be used to measure idea novelty based on the actual text describing an idea. In the third step, we will conduct the field experiments that analyze the role of novelty and social cues in the idea evaluation process. To do so, we will experimentally vary the conditions under which managers evaluate the proposed ideas.While evaluating and selecting ideas has become a key aspect of successful innovation, research on the idea evaluation process is still developing and far from complete. With the proposed research we seek to advance the literature on three accounts. First, the field experimental research design enables us to provide causal evidence on the effect of idea novelty and social cues on idea evaluation. Most of prior research has presented evidence based on correlations and has thus fallen short of this “gold standard.” Second, we make an important methodological contribution by measuring idea novelty based on the actual text describing an idea. Earlier research has largely relied on measures of combinatorial novelty using pre-established schemata, such as patent classes. In contrast, we will employ topic modeling to derive a content-based novelty measure. Third, we advance innovation research by studying the impact of social relationships and content in parallel. Whereas network research on innovation has been criticized for lacking consideration for content, and content studies have been disconnected from social structure, we seek to integrate social relations and content.The proposed project will advance theory on idea novelty and social cues, and it will push the research frontier by combining methods from computer science with field experimental designs enabling causal inference.