Greater associative knowledge variety in crowdsourcing platforms leads to generation of novel solutions by crowds

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to offer implications and future research directions related to new organizational forms like crowds. Organizations are increasingly relying on online crowds to innovate through mechanisms such as crowdsourcing, open innovation, innovation challenges and tournaments. To leverage the "wisdom of crowds", crowdsourcing platforms that enable heterogeneous knowledge sharing in crowds lead to novel solution generation by individuals in the crowd. Based on the associative variety memory model of creativity, the authors hypothesize that when a crowd contributes a heterogeneous knowledge in form of a variety of knowledge associations, individual crowd members tend to generate solutions that are more novel. In contrast to the brainstorming view that focuses on ideas as knowledge, the authors propose, test, find and elaborate on implications of crowd sharing of heterogeneous knowledge for the generation of innovation, i.e. novel ideas. The authors coded and analyzed all the posts in 20 innovation challenges leveraging online temporary crowds that were structured to foster knowledge sharing as part of the idea generation process. The analysis shows a positive relationship between the variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd and the generation of novel solutions by individuals in the crowd. Further, the variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd has a stronger relationship with novel solution generation than the number of associations generated by the crowd, i.e. variety of knowledge has a greater impact than either the quantity of knowledge or the number of solution-ideas shared. The authors offer four implications and several future directions for research on the new organizational form of online crowds. Design/methodology/approach: The authors coded and analyzed all the posts in 20 innovation challenges. They also designed and ran these challenges in collaboration with corporate sponsors. The ideas in the challenge were rated by senior executive at each company using a creative forecasting method. Findings: The variety of knowledge associations contributed by the crowd has a stronger relationship with novel solution generation than the number of associations generated by the crowd, i.e. variety of knowledge has a greater impact than either the quantity of knowledge or the number of solution-ideas shared. Research limitations/implications: The authors offer four implications and several future directions for research on the new organizational form of online crowds. Practical implications: The authors propose several ways in which companies running innovation challenges can moderate and encourage crowd to generate a variety of knowledge. Originality/value: The authors believe that we are the first empirical paper to emphasize and show that associative variety of knowledge sharing in crowds has impact on novel idea generation by crowds. This view is counter to "electronic brainstorming" view where crowd is asked to just generate these ideas and often just submit their ideas to the sponsor. Their view also goes beyond knowledge refinement of ideas by crowds to more of knowledge integration by crowds.