Incentivizing User Contributions in Idea Crowdsourcing through Quantitative and Qualitative Feedback : A Field Experiment

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a popular tool for firms to harness external knowledge and resources. One variation of crowdsourcing entails the use of corporate channels in social network services (SNS) such as Twitter to hold public idea competitions. This study examined the role of feedback interaction between participants of idea competitions. More specifically, the study examined the impact of incentives to provide feedback on other participants’ ideas. We found that idea competitions where explicit incentives were introduced to elicit crowdsourced feedback in the form of qualitative comments resulted in improved idea generation performance-with more ideas generated overall, and more ideas generated through participant collaborations, through increased comment-posting activities. Based on the findings, implications for theory and practice are discussed.