The idea marketplace: Diversity, social capital, and innovation

Andreas H. Heusler, Natasha Z. Foutz, Martin Spann, Lucas Stich

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science · 2025 · Volume 53 · Issue 1

Abstract

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 accessandstatus—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 thehigher quality ideasare generated by the participants with greaterresource access, whereascontinued engagement, including contributing larger quantities of ideas, discussion threads, and comments, stems from those with higherstatus. These findings have important implications for ideator recruitment and idea market design.

Keywords

Ideators, Idea market, Social capital theory, Social network analysis, Open innovation

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