Collective intelligence with web-based information aggregation markets: The role of market facilitation in idea management

Communities within corporations can significantly contribute to innovation and the idea management process. The collection of ideas and aggregation of evaluation information from a community is a demanding task that requires the use of special methods. In this paper we explore the use of information aggregation markets (IAMs) in the fuzzy front-end of innovation. Furthermore, we identify and define a type of facilitation which we name ‘market facilitation’ and we assess its role in new idea generation at different levels of restrictiveness. The empirical results of a laboratory experiment indicate that IAMs enable the acquisition of more ideas than traditional brainstorming and of similar quality. Market facilitation forms entailing different levels of restrictiveness are found to affect the number and the quality of ideas acquired. As the level of market facilitation restrictiveness decreases, the number of acquired ideas increases and their quality deteriorates. To practitioners, our study provides empirical evidence on the advantages of IAMs over traditional electronic brainstorming as an alternative method for idea generation and evaluation. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.