You might think that companies that receive the most feedback from customers with clever ideas would be in the best position to break new ground. However, new research shows that the more distant an idea is from a business or organization’s expertise, the more likely it is to be disregarded. And perhaps more discouraging, as more suggestions come in, organizations narrow their attention even further and filter out distant ideas.
These are the main findings of a new study published in the Academy of Management Journal, titled “Distant Search, Narrow Attention: How Crowding Alters Organizations’ Filtering of Suggestions in Crowdsourcing.” Leading the research was Henning Piezunka, a Ph.D. candidate in Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering, and Linus Dahlander, an associate professor at the European School of Management and Technology.
Their findings were based on an expansive and sophisticated, four-year analysis of more than 105,000 crowdsourced suggestions sent in to 922 organizations by members of the public. The innovation scholars got their data from a user-feedback company that works with over 20,000 organizations across the commercial, nonprofit and government sectors.
They ended up studying a much smaller set of entities because they wanted ones that they could cross-reference on CrunchBase and ZoomInfo. And so, most of the organizations in their study ended up being young, entrepreneurial companies, according to Piezunka, a Ph.D. researcher in management science and engineering at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program – the entrepreneurship center in the university’s engineering school.
“Today, we have the ability to search very broadly and get a wide range of suggestions,” he said. “But then, what we pay attention to is very narrow.”
The researchers found that, generally, 15 percent of the crowdsourced suggestions in their sample were given consideration. But then they drilled down and analyzed each suggestion’s content and several other aspects of the feedback that helped determine how familiar or unfamiliar it was: whether the organization heard from the external contributor before, whether it has heard from that “type” of contributor before – in most cases, type referred to profession – and whether suggestions were similar to others in characteristics such as word count and choice.
That last area of assessment was part of a more sophisticated text-analysis technique that won Piezunka a Sloan Foundation grant in computational social science.
The researchers referred to the process of disregarding certain ideas as “narrowing,” and to the degree of an idea’s unfamiliarity as its “distance.” They also equate the soliciting of suggestions by organizations as a “search.”
“Look at it as a public brainstorming,” said Piezunka, now an assistant professor at the graduate business school INSEAD in France. “This is how organizations innovate today. You no longer have the lonely inventor-genius who comes up with all the great ideas, and so you actually have to reach out and engage crowds of people.”
For proprietary reasons, the researchers did not name the businesses or organizations in their study. But as an example, they pointed to BP’s open call for suggestions on oil spill-cleanup ideas after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The 120,000 that came in represented one of the largest pools of external suggestions ever documented and included some ideas that were quite foreign for a petroleum company – such as using genetically modified bacteria to breakdown the spilled oil.
Instead, some of the most widely known measures that BP took were ones that were closely aligned to the type of work it already does: using mechanical equipment to sift out residual oil from sand, or hiring contractors to skim oil off the water’s surface. And while ascertaining the sincerity of BP’s wide call for suggestions was irrelevant to Piezunka’s study, he seemed certain that the crowdsourcing campaigns of the organizations he examined were not just marketing gimmicks.
“There’s nothing cynical about it,” Piezunka said. “My impression was that these organizations really felt like they wanted to broaden themselves and get new ideas. But then they actually get trapped.”
That a deluge of ideas reduces the chances of any single suggestion getting noticed by an organization may seem like an obvious fact: We can only pay attention to so much. But Piezunka said the takeaway for businesses is to, first, be aware that you need the capability to look through all the suggestions for the rare gems, before embarking on a broad idea search.
Second, if an organization doubts it will have the capacity to comb through all the suggestions, Piezunka said it could decide at the outset to limit its campaign by, for instance, only brainstorming with select individuals.
“Sometimes, there’s a tendency to rush into these new models of innovation. But these processes require careful management,” he said. “In these crowdsourcing models, there can be an enormous gap between the potential and what organizations actually get out of it.”
