Insights: Do Organizations Implement the Best Crowdsourced Ideas?

January 15, 2015
ESMT Berlin Germany

Many companies use crowdsourcing in search of new ideas. But in a video interview for ESMT’s Knowledge series, Professor Linus Dahlander says that organizations seeking crowdsourced ideas end up sticking with the most familiar ones.

Organizations use crowdsourcing to solicit external audiences for new ideas, but which of those ideas do they actually implement?

As a part of EMST’s Knowledge series, Professor Linus Dahlander discusses his research examining how companies use and examine crowdsourced information. He found that when solicitations may result in a large pool of recommendations, a “crowding” effect overwhelms organizations’ ability to evaluate them—and they end up paying more attention to the more familiar ones.

"One of the things that [companies] typically say is that they want distant knowledge or novel ideas that they can use for their products and services,” he says. “What our research suggests is that that may be very difficult to actually translate into some kind of practice."

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