Empowered by Innovation: Unravelling Determinants of Idea Implementation in Open Innovation Platforms

Companies use crowdsourcing to solve specific problems or to search for innovation. By using open innovation platforms, where community members propose ideas, companies can better serve customer needs.

So far, it remains unclear which factors influence idea implementation in crowd sourcing context. With the research idea that we present here, we aim to get a better understanding of the success and failure of ideas by examining relationships between characteristics of ideators, characteristics of ideas and the likelihood of implementation.

In order to test the methodological approach that we propose in this paper in which we investigate for business relevant innovativeness as well as sentiment based on text analytics, data including unstructured text was mined from Dell IdeaStorm using webcrawling and scraping techniques.

Some relevant hypotheses that we define in this paper were confirmed on the Dell IdeaStorm dataset but in order to generalize our findings we want to apply to the Leg o dataset in our current work in progress. Possible implications of our novel research idea can be used to fill theoretical gaps in marketing literature, help companies to better structure their search for innovation and for ideators to better understand factors contributing to successful idea generation.