Sanghyun Park, Henning Piezunka, Linus Dahlander
Crowdsourcing allows organizations to source novel ideas from external contributors–often carrying knowledge that is distant to the organization. We theorize that organizations’ continuous crowdsourcing initiatives are characterized by an interplay between organizations’ selection of ideas and contributors’ submission of ideas that narrows the kind of ideas organizations gain access to. Specifically, organizations select a subset of the crowdsourced ideas for implementation. Contributors–who strive to see their ideas implemented–then submit ideas similar to those already chosen by organizations. We suggest that this “co-evolutionary lockin” where the variety of ideas narrows is strengthened the more consistent an organization’s selection is because it then provides a clearer signal for contributors regarding the type of knowledge the organization is looking for. By contrast, the co-evolutionary lock is attenuated if contributors are less aware of or pay less attention to the organizations’ selection. We examine our theory by creating a novel dataset that includes the crowdsourcing initiatives of 70,159 organizations. Using text analysis, we measure a variety of ideas at the community level and examine its intertemporal dynamics. We contribute to research on crowdsourcing and search for external knowledge. © 2022, Academy of Management. All rights reserved.
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