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Open innovation contests that display all submitted ideas to participants are a popular way for firms to generate ideas. In such contest-based ideation, the authors show that seeing numerous competitive ideas of others harms, rather than stimulates, creative performance (Study 1). Others' competitive prior ideas interfere with idea generation, as new ideas need to be differentiated from the preceding ones to be original. Exposure to an increasing number of prior ideas thus heightens individuals' perceived constraints of expressing ideas and harms creative performance (Studies 2 and 3). Furthermore, creative performance monotonically reduces with an increasing number of prior ideas (Study 4). A final study demonstrates that showing only a limited number of ideas as well as grouping prior ideas offer actionable ways to reduce prior ideas' harmful influence (Study 5). These results illustrate viable ways to improve contest-based ideation outcomes merely by changing how competitive prior ideas are presented.

In ideation contests, solvers generate ideas for innovation problems and hereby compete for financial rewards provided by the seekers based on the quality of the ideas. Such contests integrate external sources to find ideas with a high degree of novelty and customer benefits. Frequently, these contests are open with public visibility of all submitted solutions. Although companies are increasingly using platforms like Crowdspring.com, 99Designs. com, or Atizo.com to host open contests, within contest dynamics are not well understood. In this project, Aryobsei et al investigate the role of prior ideas in open ideation contests and their influence on the creative performance of solvers. Their research is related to an emerging stream of literature that is concerned with the optimal design of ideation contests. This stream mostly emphasizes financial rewards or nonfinancial aspects such as the optimal number of participants, the optimal duration of a contest, or how solvers should receive feedback from seekers during the contest.