My paper “Adopting Seekers’ Solution Exemplars in Ideation Contests: Antecedents and Consequences” has been accepted at Information Systems Research.

Abstract: To benefit from the wisdom of the crowd in ideation contests, seekers should understand how their involvement affects solvers’ ideation and the ensuing ideas. This present study addresses this need by examining the antecedents and consequences of solvers’ exemplar adoption (i.e., use of solution exemplars that the seekers provide) in such contests. We theorize how the characteristics of seekers’ exemplars (specifically, quantity and variability) and prizes jointly influence exemplar adoption. We also consider how exemplar adoption affects the effectiveness of the resulting ideas, conditional on solvers’ experience with the problem domain of the contests. The results from a company naming contest and an ad design contest show that exemplar quantity and exemplar variability both positively affect exemplar adoption, but the effects are strengthened and attenuated, respectively, by prize attractiveness. The outcomes of a campaign using the ads from the design contest further show that greater exemplar adoption improves ad effectiveness (in terms of click-through performance), although this is negatively moderated by solvers’ domain experience. We discuss the theoretical and practical contributions of this research to ideation contests.

To view the final draft: http://ssrn.com/abstract=3034630. Credits to the ISR review team for helping me improve this research. The paper went through a few rounds of review and expanded from one study in the initial submission to three studies in the final version. I also received valuable comments from many colleagues in the community. The end product is definitely a much better piece of work.