Idea development in online internal crowdsourcing : The role of peer contributions

Abstract: This thesis focuses on idea development in online internal crowdsourcing. Online crowdsourcing for ideas has seen a substantial uptake in practice and has attracted a leading wave of researchers in the academic field. Although crowdsourcing can significantly expand the knowledge resources available in terms of the volume and variety of ideas, it also creates additional challenges for innovation management to nurture ideas to innovation. An emerging management issue is how to manage voluntary peer contributions to ideas in online internal crowdsourcing of the front end of innovation.  Online internal crowdsourcing, which captures and develops ideas solely from employees, is less well-understood than other forms of crowdsourcing from external users. Furthermore, extant knowledge of ideation has thus far focused on idea generation, whereas little is known about what really happens during the development of ideas and also if and to what extent value is created when peer communities contribute to ideas. This thesis aims to explore the role of peer contributions in online internal crowdsourcing for idea development. Based on the data of ideas and comments collected from an idea management system in a Swedish multinational company, several types of analyses have been used to increase understanding of the role of peer contributions in idea development. For example, text mining methods including sentiment and expertise analyses have been selected to observe the role of contribution content in terms of sentiment and the knowledge background of contributors. On this basis, four appended research studies were conducted. The research results identify four types of peer communication in terms of contribution behaviors based on proactive/passive engagement as well as knowledge-focus, and their contributions influence idea development in different ways. In terms of the role of peer contributions, it is seen that dimensions of peer contributions, including timeliness, content sentiment and content type, play critical roles in idea development, and their roles are influenced by the contributors’ knowledge. These results contribute to existing theory in terms of extending the view of ideation to include idea development. This view not only provides new insights on peer-to-peer communication but also a more detailed understanding of peer contributions in online internal crowdsourcing for ideas. Moreover, the results also provide management implications for how firms can use online internal crowdsourcing to manage voluntary peer assistance to nurture ideas.