Poetz and Schreier the value of crowdsourcing wp

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Abstract: Generating ideas for new products used to be the exclusive domain of marketers, engineers, and/or designers. Users have only recently been recognized as an alternative source of new product ideas. Whereas some have attributed great potential to outsourcing idea generation to the “crowd” of users (“crowdsourcing”), others have clearly been more skeptical. The authors join this debate by presenting a real-world comparison of ideas actually generated by a firm’s professionals with those generated by users in the course of an idea generation contest. Both professionals and users provided ideas to solve an effective and relevant problem in the consumer goods market for baby products. Executives from the underlying company evaluated all ideas (blind to their source) in terms of key quality dimensions, including novelty, customer benefit, and feasibility. The study reveals that the crowdsourcing process generated user ideas that score significantly higher in terms of novelty and customer benefit, and somewhat lower in terms of feasibility. However, the average values for feasibility – in sharp contrast to novelty and customer benefit – tended to be relatively high overall, meaning that feasibility did not constitute a narrow bottleneck in this study. Even more interestingly, it is found that user ideas are placed more frequently than expected among the very best in terms of novelty and customer benefit. These findings, which are quite counterintuitive from the perspective of classic new product development (NPD) literature, suggest that, at least under certain conditions, crowdsourcing might constitute a promising method to gather user ideas which can complement those of a firm’s professionals at the idea generation stage in NPD. 2
Introduction Consider the following experiment in idea generation: A company wishes to develop promising ideas for new products. Who would you suggest should be asked to generate ideas: the professional engineers, marketers and/or designers who work for the company, or its potential customers or users in general? Moreover, who would be able to come up with better ideas? Despite its obvious importance to the ultimate success of a firm, the idea generation process is an area where scholars generally still have limited insights with regard to the “ideal” process. Schulze and Hoegl (2008, p. 1742), for example, note that “how new product ideas are effectively generated still remains an issue of high relevance to both management scholars and practitioners.” Usually, however, it is a firm’s marketers, engineers, and/or designers who take on the creative tasks in generating new product ideas. Based on extensive marketing research (or not) and using some theoretical approach to creativity in new product development (NPD) (e.g., Amabile et al. 2005, Goldenberg, Lehmann, and Mazursky 2001, Majchrzak, Cooper, and Neece 2004, Schulze and Hoegl 2008), those professionals try to identify (or create) and solve a relevant consumer problem by inventing a creative solution. The key assumption behind that intuitive approach is that a firm’s professionals, unlike users, have the experience and expertise required to come up with truly novel and promising ideas which might be appealing to broader parts of the market and might therefore lead to successful new products (Ulrich and Eppinger 2008, Ulrich 2007). In a similar vein, Bennett and Cooper (1981, p. 54), for example, argued that a truly creative idea for a new product “is very often out of the scope of the normal experience of the consumer.” Such opinions have been substantiated by the idea that users might be too accustomed to current consumption conditions (i.e., the present), thus preventing them from predicting and shaping the future (Leonard and Rayport 1997). Consequently, the logical conclusion from that classic line of 3
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Page 25 and 26: References Agerfalk, Pär J. and Br
Page 27 and 28: Franke, Nikolaus and Katharina Klau
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Page 37: Biographical sketches Marion Poetz

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