Crowdsourced Idea Generation: The Effect of Exposure to an Original Idea

The effect of exposure to an original or common idea on crowdsourced idea generation was studied by asking crowd workers to design a public service advertisement. As compared to having no idea exposure, exposure to an original idea decreased fluency and increased the average originality of ideas generated by each person. By contrast, exposure to a common idea had no effect on either idea originality or fluency. However, the two exposure conditions showed no significant difference in either fluency or idea originality. The semantic similarity between a stimulus idea and the first idea generated was higher when the stimulus was common, as opposed to original, as measured by latent semantic analysis. The implications of these results for research and practice are discussed.