Firms increasingly leverage idea markets, where participants (such as employees) generate, improve, and evaluate ideas on a collaborative digital platform. Different participants contribute differently to the ideation process, some generating high quality ideas while others initiating discussion threads and commenting on the ideas to further enhance the ideas’ quality. Such diverse contributions may be importantly influenced by the participants’ diverse social capital—resource access and status—in their pre-existing network. We theorize this relationship and further test our hypotheses by conducting two idea market studies, one involving only a firm’s employees (Study 1: closed innovation) and the other further incorporating non-employees (Study 2: open innovation). We show that the higher quality ideas are generated by the participants with greater resource access, whereas continued engagement, including contributing larger quantities of ideas, discussion threads, and comments, stems from those with higher status. These findings have important implications for ideator recruitment and idea market design.

公司越来越多地利用创意市场，参与者（例如员工）在协作数字平台上生成、改进和评估创意。不同的参与者对构思过程的贡献不同，一些参与者产生高质量的想法，而另一些参与者发起讨论线程并对想法进行评论，以进一步提高想法的质量。这种多样化的贡献可能会受到参与者在其现有网络中的多样化社会资本（资源获取和地位）的重要影响。我们对这种关系进行了理论分析，并通过进行两项创意市场研究进一步检验我们的假设，一项研究仅涉及公司员工（研究 1：封闭式创新），另一项进一步纳入非员工（研究 2：开放式创新）。我们表明，更高质量的想法是由拥有更多资源访问权限的参与者产生的，而持续参与，包括贡献更多的想法、讨论线索和评论，则源于那些地位较高的参与者。这些发现对于创意者招聘和创意市场设计具有重要意义。