Getting on board of new ideas: How inventors create commitment for their ideas

Ideas, in order to get implemented, need to attract buy-in, support, and commitment from other members in an organization. In this study, we draw from the literature on crowdsourcing and creativity to shed more light on when and how idea generators - within the context of an idea generation platform - create commitment for their ideas from other members. We argue that commitment to an idea from other organizational members depends on the idea generator’s type and level of engagement on the internal crowdsourcing platform. To test our hypotheses, we study participants of an internal crowdsourcing platform of a multinational Fortune 500 company. As part of this crowdsourcing platform, participants could join someone else’s ideas if it were to be implemented. Idea commitment implied that people dedicated themselves digitally to the further development and implementation of the idea if it were to be selected. Our findings show that idea generators who engage with others’ ideas on the crowdsourcing platform are able to elicit more support from others for their own idea in the form of idea commitment, and that the extent of this commitment is moderated by the tone of previous engagements. We discuss the implications of our study in terms of contributions to the creativity and crowdsourcing literature.