Somebody Else's Scientists Know Best: Crowdwisdom Selection for Breakthrough Product Concepts
Speaker
Abstract
| Although the main strength of crowdsourcing is that of providing a wide array of novel ideas to the new concept creation process of organizations, (Howe:2006; Poetz et al:2010; Schenk, E. and Guittard, C. 2011), no crowdsoucing studies have distinguished between the use of crowdsoucing to generate incremental instead of breakthrough ideas (Kristensson and Magnusson:2005). Whenever required, breakthrough product concepts provide line and top managers with more headaches than incremental ones. Selection tools and organizations are geared to supporting the latter but ill equipped when it comes to significantly longer time horizons and uncertain market outcomes. One interpretation rarely explored for new concept selection lies with the concept of functional fixedness: scientists or technicians' judgement for idea generation and concept selection may be obscured by some preconceived notion about a given technology or by a given application (Marquis, 1964; Chrysikou and Weisberg:2005; Dunker:1945). We will demonstrate that outside scientists with low functional fixedness show consistently different and more commercially sound results from in-house scientists or technicians when it comes to evaluating a series of incremental and breakthrough concepts deliberately introduced to them. |
| Contact information: |
| Dicea Jansen |
