Adopting Seekers' Solution Exemplars in Crowdsourcing Ideation Contests: Antecedents and Consequences.

Crowd-based ideation contests facilitate solution-seeking firms (seekers) to address their problems by soliciting ideas from external individuals (solvers). In this study, we examine how seekers' involvement—particularly in terms of the exemplars and prizes that they provide—shape the ideation process and outcomes in such contests. Although seekers' decisions about the exemplars to show and prizes to offer may be independent from one another, we show that certain aspects of these decisions jointly impact the extent to which solvers adopt seekers' exemplars in their ideas. This finding demonstrates that individual facets of seeker involvement could intertwine and have intricate effects on solvers right from the initiation of the contests. We further show that, by influencing solvers' exemplar adoption, seekers can also affect the effectiveness of the ideas. All in all, our results indicate that seekers acquire ideas not just through the crowd but also with the crowd, and they play an active role in how and what solvers ideate. Instead of simply delegating idea generation to solvers, seekers should thus share the onus of ideation and be aware of the impacts of their involvement in contests. To benefit from the wisdom of the crowd in ideation contests, seekers should understand how their involvement affects solvers' ideation and the ensuing ideas. This present study addresses this need by examining the antecedents and consequences of solvers' exemplar adoption (i.e., use of solution exemplars that the seekers provide) in such contests. We theorize how the characteristics of seekers' exemplars (specifically, quantity and variability) and prizes jointly influence exemplar adoption. We also consider how exemplar adoption affects the effectiveness of the resulting ideas, conditional on solvers' experience with the problem domain of the contests. The results from a company naming contest and an ad design contest show that exemplar quantity and exemplar variability both positively affect exemplar adoption, but the effects are strengthened and attenuated, respectively, by prize attractiveness. The outcomes of a campaign using the ads from the design contest further show that greater exemplar adoption improves ad effectiveness (in terms of click-through performance) although this is negatively moderated by solvers' domain experience. We discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of this research to ideation contests. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2018.0810. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]