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This study aims to contribute to the open innovation (OI) literature by investigating the transitions between three phases in the OI process (i.e. idea generation, idea promotion and idea realization) and how these are moderated by different forms of shared leadership (i.e. transactional, and transformational) as perceived by participants in the OI process.

The authors tested a set of hypotheses using moderated mediation PLS-SEM models on a bootstrapped sample of OI participants (N = 173).

The authors found a direct relationship between idea generation and realization, as well as indirectly through idea promotion. This study implies that the promotion of ideas by participants can be beneficial in inter-organizational OI teams, as promotion of ideas provides a linkage between the generation of ideas and the idea realization phase. However, while shared leadership has been shown to be beneficial in conventional teams, the authors found evidence that this may not be the case in inter-organizational OI teams. Higher levels of shared transformational leadership from colleagues with whom employees do not share the same organizational background may hamper the promotion of ideas.

In contrast to the mainstream view, the authors found significant evidence that transformational shared leadership negatively moderates the direct relationship between idea generation and the promotion of ideas and the indirect relationship between idea generation and realization via idea promotion.

This study aims to explore how online reviews and users’ social network centrality interact to influence idea popularity in open innovation communities (OICs).

This study used Python to obtain data from the LEGO Innovation Community. In total, 285,849 reviews across 4,475 user designs between March 2019 and March 2021 were extracted to test this study’s hypotheses.

The ordinary least square regression analysis results show that review volume, review valence, review variance and review length all positively influence idea popularity. In addition, users’ in-degree centrality positively interacts with review valence, review variance and review length to influence idea popularity, while their out-degree centrality negatively interacts with such effects.

Drawing on the interactive marketing perspective, this study employs a large sample from the LEGO community and examines user design and idea popularity from a community member’s point of view. Moreover, this study is the first to confirm the role of online reviews and user network centrality in influencing idea popularity in OICs from a social network perspective. Furthermore, by integrating social network analysis and persuasion theories, this study confirms the interaction effects of review characteristics and users’ social network centrality on idea popularity.

This study’s results highlight that users should actively interact and share with reviewers their professional product design knowledge and/or the journey of their design to improve the volume of reviews on their user designs. Moreover, users could also draw more attention from other users by actively responding to heterogeneous reviews. In addition, users should be cautious with the number of people they follow and ensure that they improve their in-degree rather than out-degree centrality in their social networks.

This study integrates social network analysis and persuasion theories to explore the effects of online reviews and users’ centrality on idea popularity in OICs, a vital research issue that has been overlooked.

Background: The ideas-informed society represents a desired situation in which: (1) citizens see value in staying up to date, and; (2) citizens regularly keep themselves up to date by actively, openly and critically engaging with new ideas, developments and claims to truth. As a result, it is hoped citizens become increasingly knowledgeable, better able to make good decisions, and better positioned to support new progressive norms and beliefs. Yet despite these potential benefits, a substantive proportion of the population do not value staying up to date, nor attempt to do so.

Methods: With this research project we seek to identify whether the theoretical lens of anomie can account for why “ideas refusers” do not engage with ideas, as well as provide clues as to how they might be encouraged to do so. To explore the possible impacts of anomie on ideas-engagement we conducted four online focus groups, interviewing a purposive sample of ten individuals who previously indicated they were ideas refusers.

Results: Our findings identify eleven themes which seemingly account for why ideas refusers do not currently engage with ideas. Of these, ten are related to anomie, including themes which encapsulate feelings of frustration, anxiety, confusion and powerlessness regarding the complexities of modern society.

Conclusions: We also identify three areas of future focus that might help the ongoing development of the ideas-informed society. These are: (1) the more positive and relevant reporting of ideas; (2) supporting “healthy” face-to-face engagement with ideas; and (3) supporting effective ideas engagement through social media.

This research sought to propose a theoretical model that analyzes the factors associated with unlearning (individual and organizational) and contributes to generating and realizing ideas among young people at the beginning of their careers based on the predominant type of structure.

The study had a sample (n = 971) and used the multivariate data analysis partial least squares - Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM regular) and multigroup analysis (PLS-MGA) to identify significant differences between the estimates of the specific parameters of each group (a- Organic/b- Mechanistic).

All the direct relationships and formulated mediations were found to be supported, except for H6 (ET→EO) within the group that had a primarily mechanistic organizational structure. Thus, the more turbulent the environmental, the more initiative-taking, innovative and risk-taking a company tends to be. However, it remains to be seen whether the organizational structure plays a role in facilitating or hindering this relationship. H1 (IG→IR) indicates that predominantly organic organizations have a stronger and more consistent relationship with the knowledge developed through individual and organizational unlearning process. This knowledge contributes to the idea-generation process and ultimately leads to realizing those ideas.

The article contributes to literature by proposing an original and integrated theoretical model incorporating individual and organizational approaches to unlearning to understand the effect on idea generation and realization.

Firms increasingly rely on both external and internal crowdsourcing to capture ideas more broadly and enhance innovative problem-solving. Especially in internal crowdsourcing, knowledge sharing that contributes to develop or further the understanding of the problem the idea is focused on solving can take place between critical employees, and in that way improve ideas generated by others. This far, most crowdsourcing practices have focused on identifying solutions to proposed problems, whereas much less is known about how crowds can be used to share problem-related knowledge. There is thus an untapped potential in leveraging crowds not just to generate solution-oriented ideas but also to share knowledge to improve ideas and even to reframe problems. This paper aims to explore the effect of problem- and solution-related knowledge sharing in internal crowdsourcing for idea development.

Data on ideas and comments were collected from an idea management system in a Swedish multinational company. The investigation captures the influences of the problem- and solution-related knowledge sharing on ideas based on content analysis and logistic regression analysis.

The results from this study show that sharing knowledge related to solutions in idea development impacts idea acceptance positively, whereas sharing knowledge related to problems in idea development has a negative effect on the likelihood of idea acceptance and these effects of knowledge sharing are moderated by the active author responses.

This research provides managerial implications for firms to deliberately manage knowledge sharing in peer communities in internal crowdsourcing, especially by providing suggestions on problem reframing and solution refining for ideas.

The results contribute to existing theory in terms of extending the view of crowdsourcing in ideation to include how crowds contribute to the development of the problem and the solution during the development of ideas and providing new insights on knowledge sharing in internal crowdsourcing based on problem-solving theory.

Background: Ideas always have and always will change the world; with ideas-engagement enabling individuals to become more knowledgeable, better able to make good decisions and better positioned to re-align their values in response to new progressive norms and beliefs. Given these potential benefits, of primary interest is how citizens can be most effectively encouraged to engage with new ideas.

Methods: With this study we test the efficacy of two approaches designed to enhance citizen’s perceptions regarding the value of ideas-engagement. Specifically, we recontextualise a previously undertaken small-scale randomised control trial designed to stimulate states of either curiosity or pragmatic prospection amongst two randomly allocated groups of respondents. Our target variables involve the importance respondents attribute to staying up to date, as well as to four related attitudinal variables. Our target audience is the voting age population of England.

Results: 515 participants took part in the experiment, with 269 receiving the curiosity stimulating intervention and 246, the prospection intervention. Our findings suggest that, by the end of four weeks, only the intervention designed to promote pragmatic prospection had significantly impacted on the importance respondents attribute to staying up to date. It also positively impacted the value-scores for one of the secondary attitudinal variables (relating to the importance of supporting physical and mental-health).

Conclusions: While this study provides useful insight regarding ideas-engagement, further work is needed. In particular, future studies will require a larger sample, so as to ascertain the impact of these approaches on “ideas refusers”. Also required is the inclusion of a control group to provide a definitive counter factual. Furthermore, since positive changes in attitudes towards ideas-engagement also ideally leads to changes in behaviours, questions are also needed to examine the sources of ideas respondents subsequently engage with (or not) as a result of these interventions.

New opportunities to nurture good ideas for innovation arise as firms use web-based ideation platforms for collective idea generation and development. What influences creative performance in firm-internal collective idea development is however not as well researched as idea generation and thus an important area of research is the feedback and commenting on ideas. More specifically, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas in collective firm-internal online idea development.

An empirical study has been performed, drawing on data collected from a Swedish multi-national company using a web-based system for collective firm-internal ideation. The investigation explicitly captures the effects on ideation performance played by idea development contributions, in terms of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas.

The empirical results show that idea development is significantly influenced by feedback timeliness as well as by the knowledge overlap between feedback providers and ideas. Specifically, it is found that longer time to feedback and an increased knowledge overlap result in an increased likelihood of idea acceptance. However, beyond a certain point, the positive effects of a longer time to feedback and increased knowledge overlap decrease, resulting in curvilinear relationships with idea acceptance.

The results do not only shed new light on theory about collective idea development, but also provides management implications for collective firm-internal ideation. As the data used in the study has been collected in one single firm, care should be taken in generalizing the results to other domains.

The results inform managers that it is not always better to involve more individuals in these emergent and distributed ideation systems, but that it might be beneficial to take measures to exercise some control in terms of when distributed and diverse employees can freely join in and out, especially considering the diversity of ideas, comments and creators.

The results from the empirical study reveal the effects of feedback timeliness and knowledge overlap on idea development. This provides us with new insights on the complex dynamics at place in collective firm-internal idea development and offers implications for how we can fruitfully manage this process.

Virtual crowdsourcing initiatives, and in particular crowdsourcing competitions, have become a promising means of harnessing users’ creativity to help corporate innovation. To date, research has tended to focus on the outcome of the competition, i.e. on the creative solution. There is, however, a lack of understanding in such crowdsourcing environments of the creative process itself and the influence of social interaction on the platform during this process. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors conducted a series of qualitative interviews with participants from a major European crowdsourcing platform. The platform acts as an intermediary between companies and firms, and has launched more than 370 idea competitions.

The results suggest that there are not only positive interactions going on between participants. Below the surface, there also appear destructive processes provoked by the fierce competition among the contestants for prizes and a position in the Top Innovator lists. Such destructive behavior includes bullying of successful contestants, excessive use of like-functions among befriended contestants, and mutual donation of prize money among in-group members.

Negative social interaction among contestants of crowdsourcing communities can potentially threaten the platform provider’s business model. Managers of crowdsourcing platforms should engage in the development of strong social norms explicitly disapproving destructive behavior.

This study is the first to investigate in detail the phase of idea generation on crowdsourcing platforms, and the nature and impact of social interactions among contestants.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review the existing research and summarize the value co-creation mechanism between enterprises and users in crowdsource-based open innovation (COI).

Crowdsourcing is an effective means for enterprises to launch open innovation. This paper will first introduce the concepts and forms of open innovation and crowdsourcing, and then define COI.

This paper will analyze the key parties in innovative tasks, value co-creation mechanism that creates ideas, the interaction of key participants and the process of integrating internal and external resources to realize open innovation.

In the end, this paper will put forward the theoretical framework for future studies on the development of COI from the perspective of value co-creation.

This thesis will first introduce the concepts and forms of open innovation and outsourcing and then define COI. Then it will systematically review the existing research studies and summarize the value co-creation mechanism between enterprises and users under COI model by analyzing the key parties in innovative tasks, value co-creation mechanism that creates ideas, the interaction mode of key participants and the process of enterprises integrating internal and external resources to realize open innovation.

This paper analyzes how the distribution and structure of employees' attention influence idea survival in an organizational internal crowdsourcing session.

Data from an online internal crowdsourcing session carried out within a multinational company with headquarters in Sweden were used to explore how idea attention influenced idea survival.

Our findings indicate that the positive relationship between attention allocation and idea survival is mediated by idea appreciation, i.e. positive comments and suggestions that employees provide in response to ideas. In addition, we find that competition for attention negatively moderates the relationship between idea attention and positive comments. Finally, our results indicate that ideas are more likely to survive if they are submitted earlier in the crowdsourcing process and when the elapsed time since previously posted ideas in the session is longer.

This study provides organizers of internal crowdsourcing sessions with new insights about factors influencing idea survival and about potential systematic biases in idea selection due to timing and competition between ideas.

This paper contributes to the literature highlighting the relevance of attention-based theory in the context of crowd-based creativity and innovation management.