New product development : the crowd competing with professionals in remote gaming industry : a quasi-experimental approach

Abstract

Generating ideas for new products used to be the exclusive ground of a firm’s professionals. It is only recently that users have been acknowledged as an alternative source of ideas for new products. Despite the recognised importance of the idea generation phase for the success and costs of a product, the existing literature remains inconclusive whether customers can actually provide better ideas than firm’s professionals. Whereas some leading companies have begun to tap into their potential customers to generate ideas in order to fuel their NPD processes and some academics have attributed great potential to outsourcing the generation of ideas for new products to the “crowd” (large and unknown population of users), others have clearly taken a more sceptical stance. This study bridges these two lines of literature by presenting a real-world comparison of ideas generated by a firm’s professionals with those of the users in the course of an online idea generation contest. Addressing this topic is of great importance to R&D practitioners and particularly the company where the research took place, when launching crowdsourcing initiatives in the future for specific problem areas in which the firm wishes to innovate. Internal professionals and users provided ideas to solve a relevant and existing problem in the sport bets navigation pane for an online betting company. Four executives, each being an expert in a given domain, evaluated all ideas based on key quality dimensions, namely customer benefit, novelty and feasibility. All ideas were evaluated blind of their source. The results reveal that professional ideas clearly score significantly higher on average in all three identified quality dimensions. However, statistical tests reveal that this finding can be due to the small sample size. Furthermore, the study reveals that the best ideas tended to be equally concentrated among both groups in terms of each dimension individually. Even more interestingly, it is found that only one user idea and none of those generated by professionals qualified as top idea in all three quality dimensions at the same time. These findings, which are quite in contrast with the classic new product development (NPD) literature, suggest that crowdsourcing among users might constitute a promising approach to gather user ideas that can complement those of a firm’s professionals in the idea generation stage in NPD.