Good for the Crowd, Good for the Market? A Study of Crowd-Generated Ideas and Product Market Success

A fundamental challenge in product innovation is the informational gap between a firm’s understanding of opportunities and actual needs in existing and untapped markets. Crowd-based digital platforms have been touted as an avenue to address this informational challenge. However, there remains a fundamentally unsubstantiated assumption regarding the efficacy of such platforms to capture and aggregate crowd information in a way that enhances product innovation success. We examine the extent to which innovation crowdsourcing communities enable firms to gauge demand preferences and unmet needs as manifested in two key ideation outputs: idea popularity and novelty. We theorize and empirically test the implications of these two attributes for product innovation performance based on evidence from Salesforce. Our findings shed light on the role of digital platforms as a useful aggregator of market information and shift the emphasis from the ideation phase of crowds’ knowledge engagement to their value proposition in the market.