Involving the crowd in innovation work

Increasingly practitioners use crowds on digital platforms during the innovation process within firms. This project focuses on the identification and verification of the boundary conditions for successfully using crowds in the process of idea evaluation and market forecasting.

We address the role of thinking style and task complexity in affecting the performance of crowds while evaluating innovation outcomes (e.g. newly launched products). Insights from our research will help firms and especially R&D managers to understand how to leverage crowds and open firm boundaries by better understanding forecasting and evaluation processes for the purpose of predicting and selecting new ideas, products and services.