Why the ideas of others may be your secret innovation engine

Organizations understandably focus on generating ideas. Open innovation initiatives, internal communities, and idea management systems flood the pipeline with suggestions for products, processes, and strategies. But someone has to evaluate those ideas, and many organizations worry that this workload may be too much, turning talented managers and experts into mere gatekeepers, checking others’ ideas instead of applying their own creativity. Recent evidence, however, tells a very different story.

A large-scale study of over 185,000 ideas at a large manufacturing company found that evaluating the ideas of others crowds in creativity rather than crowding it out. Decision-makers generated 80% more ideas on the very day they reviewed others’ ideas, with effects lasting up to two weeks. And the quality of these ideas was higher than usual, with a 19% boost in value and a higher likelihood of producing top-performing solutions. The secret: exposure to others’ ideas, especially unfamiliar ones, provides new raw material for decision-makers to recombine knowledge and solve problems in novel ways. They do not just copy solutions, they tackle the problems in new ways, generating genuinely original insights.

For managers, these findings suggest a strategic rethink of evaluation practices. First, a powerful, even if indirect, way to stimulate employees to generate new and valuable ideas is to have them assess the ideas of others. This works particularly well when ideas are assigned to several evaluators who, together, cover all relevant aspects but are individually unfamiliar with some of them, thus gaining fresh food for thought. Second, rather than moving employees around the organization to expose them to new perspectives, it may be easier to let ideas circulate more widely, triggering a chain reaction of subsequent idea generation as they travel. Third, expanding participation in evaluation can foster greater involvement in idea generation and, in turn, enhance idea diversity.

In short: treating evaluation as more than a chore, but as a deliberate lever for creativity, can unlock a wealth of innovation. So next time your team groans at the thought of reviewing yet another batch of ideas, remember: those evaluations might just be the hidden spark behind your next breakthrough. Sometimes, the path to new ideas is not just thinking harder, it is reading, learning, and letting others’ creativity ignite your own.

Paper: Schnier, J., Raasch, C., Schweisfurth, T. Crowding-Out or Crowding-In? The Effects of Idea Evaluation on Evaluators’ Idea Generation, Management Science (forthcoming).

Prof. Dr. Christina Raasch is Professor of Digital Economy at KLU . She holds a joint appointment with the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW), where she is part of the Research Center focusing on Innovation and International Competition. In her research, Professor Raasch investigates how digitalization changes innovation processes and outcomes inside and outside established companies. Her current research projects focus on, e.g., effective idea creation and evaluation, enterprise crowd-funding, and disruptive innovation by and with customers.