Jack of All, Master of Some: Information Network and Innovation in Crowdsourcing Communities

Many companies obtain new product ideas from their customers through innovation crowdsourcing. This study investigates how simultaneously participating in two crowdsourcing communities hosted by one firm, a customer support community and an innovation crowdsourcing community, affects an individual’s ability to generate novel, popular, and implementable ideas. A customer support crowdsourcing community is where customers help each other develop solutions to their current problems with a company’s products and an innovation crowdsourcing community is where customers propose new product or service ideas directly to a company. We expect that simultaneously participating in these crowdsourcing communities enhances an individual’s new product ideation performance because a customer support community provides information regarding customers’ current needs and problems that can improve the quality of ideas generated. Building on analogical reasoning theory, we hypothesize that an individual’s information network, in terms of its breadth and depth, affects various new product ideation outcomes at an innovation crowdsourcing community. By utilizing a natural language processing technique, we construct each individual’s information network, based on his or her helping activities at a customer support community. Our analysis reveals that generalists, who have provided solutions on broad topic domains at a customer support community, are more likely to create novel ideas than non-generalists. Generalists who possess deep knowledge in at least one topic domain (deep generalists) outperform non-generalists in their ability to generate popular and implementable ideas. Generalists who have only shallow knowledge across diverse domain areas (shallow generalists) do not perform significantly better than non-generalists in their ability to create ideas that are popular and that are later implemented by a company. Thus, the results suggest that the ability of generalists to outperform non-generalists in creating popular and implementable ideas is contingent on whether they also possess deep knowledge.