Which effort pays off? Analyzing ideators’ behavioral patterns on corporate ideation platforms

The challenge of developing high-quality ideas as the basis new goods and services is an important topic that coincides with companies’ rapid development these products. In response, firms increasingly rely on online ideation platforms for contests to optimize their employees’ creative power. This optimization requires a profound understanding contests’ underlying mechanisms, specifically participants’ innovative behavior contributes generating, elaborating, championing based each ideator's effort distribution, namely behavioral patterns. Our analysis ideators’ patterns relationship idea success consists two steps. First, we combine contest theory literature derive eight types in contests—clustered into three categories generation, elaboration, championing—that represent required efforts compete successfully. Second, use unique empirical sample, which combines platform evaluation data corporate R&D survey data, received few days before contest's closure, analyze between invested dimensions success. results show more does not necessarily lead better results. such extensive submission (“spamming”) inspiration (“copying”), could be wasted even has adverse effects However, especially provides strong possibilities increase