5. Discussion
5.1. Implications This study contributes to the recently growing body of literature on idea generation through online crowdsourcing platform. The results yield some insightful findings for scholars and practitioners alike. Involving crowds on an online platform for ideation is apparently considered as a simple task. However, only a small portion of total submitted ideas is implementable as we find that in the considered platform, one out of 500 ideas is implemented. This finding is similar to the results of Stevens and Burley (1997) who found that only one out of 3000 ideas ultimately becomes commercially successful. Hence, scholars need to develop frameworks so that managers can reduce the ratio between submitted ideas and implemented ideas. Although the possibility of an idea to be implemented primarily depends on the crowd’s opinions, the ultimate decision for idea implementation remains in the hands of management team. Thus, best ranked ideas by crowds may not get implemented. However, crowds’ contributions on a particular idea help the managing team to narrow down promising ideas from a large number of submitted ideas. The tenures of crowds whose ideas have been implemented are almost the same in the three categories of ideas. However, ratio between implemented ideas and submitted ideas is lower in the product category than the other two categories. Thus, we can conclude that ideas of product category get implemented easily. Managers need to spend huge amount of time throughout the process to pick a tiny portion of implementable ideas from a large pool of ideas. Several previous studies also have confirmed this dilemma (Di Gangi and Wasko, 2009; Jouret, 2009; Bayus, 2013). However, crowds do not need to spend significant amount of time to come up with an idea as they inherit ideas from their first-hand experiences in Starbucks outlets.
