Unlocking Expert Creativity

Yasutomi Kitahara
Professor, NUCB Business School

In the “fuzzy front end” of new product development, companies have traditionally sought breakthrough ideas outside their walls, practicing open innovation and user innovation. Recently, they are increasingly turning to crowdsourcing, expanding this search to ordinary users. However, a major hurdle remains. While ordinary users certainly possess novel ideas, they often lack the technical know-how required to create feasible products. Experts, on the other hand, often suffer from “cognitive entrenchment” due to their deep experience, becoming fixated on dominant designs and technical feasibility. This makes it difficult for them to effectively utilize the novel ideas generated by the crowd. How can managers best integrate these two distinct groups?

Our research explores the interaction between experts and ordinary users in B2B product environments, specifically within groupware and AI sectors. Through controlled experiments, we uncovered two pivotal insights regarding knowledge sharing that challenge traditional crowdsourcing methods. First, we observed that the common practice of “educating” the crowd can backfire. When ordinary users were provided with expert knowledge? such as specific product attributes or technical examples? their creativity suffered. While their ideas became more feasible, they lost their distinct novelty, effectively mimicking the experts. To harness the crowd’s true potential, companies should avoid over-constraining them with technical details.

Second, and most crucially for R&D managers, we found that ordinary users’ ideas serve as a powerful catalyst for internal experts. In our study, when experts were primed with highly novel ideas generated by ordinary users, their own subsequent ideas became significantly more novel, without completely sacrificing their professional judgment. The “wild” nature of amateur concepts helped break the experts’ fixation on existing solutions, effectively “reframing” their approach to the problem.

These findings suggest a strategic shift in how companies utilize the crowd. Rather than tasking expensive experts with the tedious evaluation of thousands of amateur submissions, managers should filter for a small set of high-novelty concepts and use them as “priming” material. By exposing internal teams to these fresh, unconstrained perspectives, companies can unlock a higher tier of innovation that combines professional expertise with the spark of the crowd. This approach transforms the role of the ordinary user from a simple idea provider to an essential muse for professional innovation.

Reference

Yasutomi Kitahara, et al. (2024) Harnessing Ordinary User Creativity in New Product Development ―Experiments and Discussion of Idea Interaction between Ordinary Users and Experts―. Business model association journal
ISSN: 2432-1850 / 2185-2480