Crowdsourcing: Serial participants end up proposing less diverse ideas

Right after writing that blog post about crowdsourcing at Dell, I read an interesting piece of research about participation in the Dell Ideastorm crowdsourcing-platform. The paper is authored by Barry L. Bayus but it hasn’t been published yet: after a first version, Bayus just issued the second version on his personal website. But even if it has not been published yet, the findings are interesting to look at, because they’re among the first ones to analyze participation in crowdsourcing over time. And it seems that there are challenges ahead for Dell…

The key question of whether the supply of quality ideas can be sustained by an ongoing crowdsouring community over time

Target Marketing had noticed this research months ago, I wonder why it hasn’t received much attention. Bayus’ objective is to explore “the nature of an individual‘s ideation efforts in a crowdsourcing community over time“. More and more companies are indeed building up co-innovation platform to get people’s ideas, and I’ve talked about some of them (Tchibo Ideas in Germany or B’Twin Lab in France). “Companies are very interested in ongoing crowdsourcing communities because consumers [...] are intrinsically motivated to freely contribute their ideas“, Bayus says in the introduction of his paper. But having a platform is good, having a constant stream of fresh ideas is better…

Both the number of IDEAS and the number of IDEATORS lowers over time

By analyzing 2 years of public data taken from www.ideastorm.com, Bayus wants to find out whether continuous participation eventually leads to less diverse ideas. And the answer is YES. Here’s a very brief list of the findings:

• Almost 85% of participants submitted only one idea, and most ideas are submitted by so-called “serial ideators”
• Only 5% of participants proposed good ideas (i.e. ideas that were eventually implemented by Dell)
• When someone submits a good idea, the diversity of the next submitted ideas lowers, as well as the likelihood of submitting another good idea

In other words:

Dell‘s future supply of quality ideas may be drying up

After generating huge buzz, Dell’s Ideastorm has to find ways to keep getting good ideas. Bayus’ paper indeed shows that “individuals in the crowd are unlikely to generate additional implemented ideas once some of their ideas are
implemented“. Another piece of research explains this decrease of submitted ideas (see chart here) by the fact that people get discouraged: they overestimate the potential of their ideas and underestimate Dell’s actual ability to implement them. Hence, you need to keep people motivated, and you need to make them think out of their box. How do you do that? One way to organize challenges or contests, and Dell called them Storm Sessions.

Bayus calls them “hyper-focused idea-generation sessions” and says that “these sessions have the potential to reduce fixation effects”. Challenges are exactly what permanent contest-platforms like eYeka, Jovoto or Zooppa do to keep their communities of creatives vibrant and active. It seems that brand have discovered this technique for their own, branded ideation-platforms: the B’Twin has challenges around cycling, Nokia has challenges around mobile technology… can you think of others?

These findings highlight some of the difficulties in maintaining an ongoing supply of quality ideas from the crowd over time, and emphasize the need for more research on crowdsourcing communities