Knowing too much? : On bias due to domain-specific knowledge in internal crowdsourcing for explorative ideas

• Internal crowdsourcing utilizes a firm’s employees, of which many have a strong understanding of the domains in which the firm operates, for contributing with, developing and evaluating ideas. On the one hand, these employees can use their domain-specific knowledge to identify the value of what may seem a far-fetched solution to the average employee. On the other hand, previous research has shown that employees typically evaluate ideas in their domains less favorably if they do not align with ongoing exploitation activities. Hence, this study focuses on whether a higher degree of relevant domain-specific knowledge makes employees participating in internal crowdsourcing prefer exploitative solutions when evaluating ideas. An empirical study of an online platform for firm-internal innovation in a multinational engineering company showed that employees who only infrequently participated in internal crowdsourcing mostly contributed to and evaluated ideas within their own domain. Employees who frequently participated also contributed to and evaluated ideas outside their own domains. By statistically analyzing group differences during idea evaluation, we show that employees participating infrequently favor exploitable solutions, whereas employees participating frequently are more uncertain. The former difference is only seen concerning ideas that require domain-specific knowledge to understand, but the latter is observed for all types of ideas. This study makes three substantial contributions. First, employees with domain-specific knowledge, through their preference for exploitative solutions, bias the outcome of internal crowdsourcing when idea evaluation requires domain-specific knowledge. Second, this bias is aggravated by the overall higher level of uncertainty displayed by employees participating frequently in internal crowdsourcing and thereby tend to reach out to other domains. Third, in order to mitigate this, bias management can build engagement in internal crowdsourcing through idea challenges that do not require domain-specific knowledge and consider avoiding employees with a strongly associated domain knowledge for idea evaluation.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Företagsekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Business Administration (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Annan teknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Other Engineering and Technologies (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Inbäddad systemteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Embedded Systems (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Annan elektroteknik och elektronik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Internal crowdsouring

Internal crowds

Domain-specific knowledge

Industrial Engineering and Management

Industriell ekonomi och organisation

Electrical Engineering

Elektro- och systemteknik

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)