Crowd Judge's Knowledge and Evaluation Validity in New Product Idea Screening

摘要

Along with the widespread involvement of externals in the idea generation process, organizations often face a novel challenge. Instead of constantly hunting for an inspiration, today organizations are often rather confronted with vast amounts of heterogeneous ideas that overload an organization's capacity to assess the ideas' potentials. As a result an organization often faces problems of (1) efficiency and (2) effectiveness when it comes to evaluating these ideas internally. To overcome these efficiency and efficacy problems, more and more organizations outsource the screening task to an a priori unknown group of self-selected evaluators to tap into the wisdom of crowds. However, crowds are not always wise, but also the madness of crowds is well documented. Literature on wisdom of crowds has argued knowledgeable crowds to be a necessary condition for crowds to be wise. While it is well established that relevant knowledge is a necessary (but not the sole) condition for crowds wisdom, it remains unclear what "relevant knowledge" actually is to make correct assessments. We therefore ask the following research question: "How does a crowd judge's knowledge base affect his or her evaluation of a new product idea? "