How Seeing Ideas of Others Can Harm Creativity in Open Innovation

The American Marketing Association posted an article which maintained that open innovation contests which involve seeing numerous competitive ideas of others harms, rather than stimulates, creative performance.  Others’ competitive prior ideas interfere with idea generation, as new ideas need to be differentiated from the preceding ones to be original. Exposure to an increasing number of prior ideas thus heightens individuals’ perceived constraints of expressing ideas and harms creative performance. However, the article cited another study which showed that presenting only a limited number of ideas as well as grouping prior ideas offer actionable ways to reduce prior ideas’ harmful influence. These results illustrate viable ways to improve contest-based ideation outcomes merely by changing how competitive prior ideas are presented.

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