Idea evaluation in innovation contest platforms: A network perspective

Innovation contest platforms are used to collect innovative ideas of consumers. Previous research on innovation contests has principally focused on participants' idea generation. In this paper, we analyze ideas evaluation by participants in coopetitive crowd innovation contests within a network perspective. Using data from an innovation contest platform, we create a network of users through their interactions. Then, we measure the impact of participants' centrality scores on received and given evaluation. Our results reveal that in-degree, out-degree and authority scores are correlated with the received positive evaluation, whereas authority is negatively correlated with the number of evaluations made. We also show that betweenness centrality and hub scores have no impact. By identifying the social influencers with network scores, we propose a methodology to reduce crowd innovation voting bias and to help managers to better select the ideas.