Collaboration Engineering to Improve the Idea Quality in Idea Communities

Idea Communities allow their users to contribute to a company’s innovation activities by sharing their ideas with the Community. These ideas are then improved according to the Mass-Collaboration principle. Due to the high diversity among the participants, a shared understanding and a common goal is hard to develop in a mass collaboration environment. According to Bounded Ideation Theory, this leads to a limitation in the quality that the mass collaboration approach can achieve on the elaboration of ideas. This research in progress paper uses a theory based design approach to develop an approach that circumvents the problems of mass collaboration in Ideas Communities. Based on Bounded Ideation Theory, Collaboration Theory and Lead User Theory, this paper suggests an approach that allows small groups of community members to collaborate on the elaboration of preselected ideas. These users are selected based on the ideas they shared with the community, are brought together to define a common goal of collaboration and supported by a set of virtual collaboration tools. The goal of the research is development, piloting and evaluation of an adaptable process that can be implemented for any existing Ideas Community Platform.