Examining the Impact of Citation Network Embeddedness on Crowdsourced Idea Refinement: The Moderating Role of Idea Breadth and Depth

Idea refinement is a crucial step in the ideation process. Given that ideas are embedded within a network of other related ideas, how the network structure fluctuates throughout the idea refinement process may affect its end outcome. Through studying proposed ideas on TVTropes.org, this research seeks to understand how network embeddedness of an idea\u27s citation network influences the idea quality perception, particularly through degree centrality, betweenness centrality and eigenvector centrality. We also study the boundary conditions of their impact on quality and analyze the moderating role of topic breadth and depth which capture the overall content of the idea. Our results suggests that the positive effect is stronger when the idea topic breadth is lesser, or the idea topic depth is greater. We further explore the mechanism behind these effects by analyzing their effect on change of positive votes and negative votes, showing the influence path might be different

Semantic and Network Evolution in Crowdsourced Idea Refinement

Successful ideation is a cornerstone of development. Advancements in information technology have allowed firms to harness collective intelligence through crowdsourcing ideation. New ideas often undergo iterative development and evaluation during a refinement phase, and only high-quality ideas get accepted for implementation. Therefore, our paper studies how idea refinement influences idea quality from both the content semantics and network structure perspectives, in the context of the online ideation community of TVTropes. For the content revisions of the idea, we examine the influence of semantic stability and convergence. For the network evolution of the idea, we investigate the impacts of refined network centrality and importance of bridging disconnected ideas. We find robust support that semantic convergence in idea content, along with improved network centrality and bridging importance increase idea quality in terms of votes and acceptance. Among these factors, bridging disconnected ideas has the strongest impact