Contraining Ideas: How seeing ideas of others harm creativity in open innovation

Item Type	Journal paper
Abstract	Open innovation contests that display all submitted ideas to participants are a popular way for firms to generate ideas. In such contest-based ideation, the authors show that seeing numerous competitive ideas of others harms, rather than stimulates, creative performance (Study 1). Others’ competitive prior ideas interfere with idea generation, as new ideas need to be differentiated from the preceding ones to be original. Exposure to an increasing number of prior ideas thus heightens individuals’ perceived constraints of expressing ideas and harms creative performance (Studies 2 and 3). Furthermore, creative performance monotonically reduces with an increasing number of prior ideas (Study 4). A final study demonstrates that showing only a limited number of ideas as well as grouping prior ideas offer actionable ways to reduce prior ideas’ harmful influence (Study 5). These results illustrate viable ways to improve contest-based ideation outcomes merely by changing how competitive prior ideas are presented.
Authors	Aryobsei, Suleiman; Dahl, Darren W.; Herrmann, Andreas & Hofstetter, Reto
Journal or Publication Title	Journal of Marketing Reserach
Language	English
Subjects	social sciences
HSG Classification	contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area	SoM - Business Innovation
Refereed	Yes
Date	2021
Publisher	American Marketing Association
Place of Publication	New York
Volume	Vol 58
Page Range	95-114
Number of Pages	19
Publisher DOI	https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022243720964429
Official URL	https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002224372...
Depositing User	Prof. Dr. Andreas Herrmann
Date Deposited	12 Apr 2021 11:25
Last Modified	20 Jul 2022 17:45
URI:	https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/262985

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Citation

Aryobsei, Suleiman; Dahl, Darren W.; Herrmann, Andreas & Hofstetter, Reto (2021) Contraining Ideas: How seeing ideas of others harm creativity in open innovation. Journal of Marketing Reserach, Vol 58 95-114.

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https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/id/eprint/262985

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