This research identifies a surprising downside of crowdsourcing: Those participants whose ideas are not selected disengage from the brand after having learned about the outcome. From this perspective, crowdsourcing might better be framed as a communal effort rather than a competition.

In recent years, more and more consumer goods firms have started to tap into the creative potential of their user communities in order to fuel their new product development pipelines. While many have hailed this paradigm shift as a highly promising development for firms, there is hardly any...