众包创新模式下的创意示范效应研究

Research on the creative idea exemplary effect under crowdsourcing innovation mode

为了发挥众包创新模式的协同效应,创客们常常被允许、鼓励关注和借鉴彼此创意或想法,但现有文献对于众包创意的示范作用,尤其他人创意示例是否以及如何影响众包创意构思乃至生成并没有给出较为一致的回答。本研究通过公共交通服务公益广告设计创意众包任务,以众包平台创客成员为被试,采用示例创意征集和众包创意生成两阶段准实验方法,聚焦创意质量、数量、语义范畴,系统探究他人创意示例对众包创意生成的影响,以窥探众包模式下的创新协作过程"黑箱"。结果发现:(1)与没有创意示例相比,独创性创意示例可以显著提升生成创意的独创性,但会降低创意生成的流畅性,即导致生成创意数量的减少;(2)比较而言,普通创意示例对生成创意的质量和数量均没有显著影响;(3)通过潜在语义分析发现,与创新组相比,普通组的生成创意与示例创意之间的语义一致性程度更高;进一步生成创意对示例创意的语义遵从效应具有即时性,会随着时间推移逐渐消失。以上结论对众包创新模式、创新协作机制研究以及众包过程设计均具有启发和指导意义。

Crowdsourcing in an increasingly important approach to pursuing innovation.In order to exert the synergy effect of crowdsourcing innovation mode,creators are often encouraged to pay attention to and learn from each other’s ideas.In crowdsourcing ideation websites,crowd members are often exposed to some stimulus ideas,such as examples provided by companies or peers’ideas.However,the existing literature does not give a more consistent answer to the exemplary effect of crowdsourcing ideas,especially whether and how idea examples from others affect crowdsourcing idea formulation and then generation.Understanding the effect of being exposed to the original stimulus ideas in the crowd-based innovation context may inform the design of the crowdsourcing process.To test this effect,an experiment was conducted where crowd-makers were invited to participate in the idea crowdsourcing task situation of public transport service advertising design based on the ZBJ.com crowdsourcing platform.In this experiment,90 experimental subjects were divided into three groups(the original group,the common group and the control group)through respectively providing each of the three groups of crowdsourcing subjects with an original idea,or a common idea,or no idea.Crowdsourced idea generation under three conditions was compared:idea generation with no idea exposure,with exposure to a common idea,and with exposure to an original idea.By comparing the originality,fluency and semantic consistency with example idea of generated ideas between the above three groups,this paper explores the influence of idea examples from others on the quality and quantity of generated ideas.The results show that the original examples can significantly improve the creativity of the generated ideas but will lead to the reduction of the number of idea generated as compared to absence of idea examples.By contrast,exposure to a common idea example has no significant impact on the quality and quantity of idea generation.Through potential semantic analysis,it is found that compared with the original group,the semantic consistency between the example idea and generated idea in the common group is higher.Further,the semantic compliance effect of example idea on generated idea is immediate,which will gradually disappear over time.The originality hypothesis,fluency hypothesis and conformity hypothesis are all partially supported.This paper contributes to the little consensus on how idea exposure affects the idea generation.Since there is a substantial difference between crowdsourced idea generation and ideation in typical psychology or design studies,a major motivation of participants is to outcompete other crowd members and contribute the best ideas in the crowdsourcing environment.This competitive drive is usually absent in brainstorming or design research.In addition,unlike in group brainstorming where building on others’ideas is an explicit rule,there is often no such instruction in crowd ideation.Moreover,because crowd members are strangers to each other,the motivation to collaborate and to build on each other’s work may be low.The above conclusions are instructive and enlightening for the management practice of crowdsourcing idea stimulation and collaboration.Since crowdsourcing innovation projects are often aimed at obtaining highly original ideas or solutions,providing original examples is helpful.Our study suggests that exposure to original ideas increases originality but not effectiveness.We also show that people are less likely to build on an original idea in crowdsourcing,so managers who want people to build on existing original ideas need to explicitly instruct crowd members to improve or to combine original ideas.Incentives need to be designed to award both the initial author and those who further develop ideas.