The idea marketplace: Diversity, social capital, and innovation

Firms increasingly leverage idea markets, where participants (such as employees) generate, improve, and evaluate ideas on a collaborative digital platform. Different participants contribute differently to the ideation process, some generating high quality ideas while others initiating discussion threads and commenting on the ideas to further enhance the ideas’ quality. Such diverse contributions may be importantly influenced by the participants’ diverse social capital—resource access and status—in their pre-existing network. We theorize this relationship and further test our hypotheses by conducting two idea market studies, one involving only a firm’s employees (Study 1: closed innovation) and the other further incorporating non-employees (Study 2: open innovation). We show that the higher quality ideas are generated by the participants with greater resource access, whereas continued engagement, including contributing larger quantities of ideas, discussion threads, and comments, stems from those with higher status. These findings have important implications for ideator recruitment and idea market design.