Linus Dahlander, European School of Management and Technology (ESMT)
Linus Dahlander, European School of Management and Technology (ESMT)
Signaling Attention by Saying No: Fostering New and Better Ideas by Rejecting Unused Ones
Signaling Attention by Saying No: Fostering New and Better Ideas by Rejecting Unused Ones
Abstract: Organizations often reach out to external contributors to solicit ideas on how to innovate. This practice can foster organizations’ innovativeness, but it may also frustrate contributors, most of whose ideas will remain unused. We ask how organizations can handle those contributors whose ideas are not selected for implementation. We study this question by examining the crowdsourcing of ideas from 962,570 external contributors by 70,196 organizations. Organizations tend to withhold judgment on ideas they do not select; however, we find that organizations can benefit by explicitly rejecting these ideas. Across different specifications, and accounting for organizations’ potentially strategic use of rejections, we find that rejecting unused ideas tends to foster idea submissions by encouraging external contributors to become more engaged (i.e., to suggest more ideas) and more effective (i.e., to suggest ideas that are more likely to be selected). We (1) show that these findings are robust when replicated on a smaller sample, (2) account for unobserved contributor heterogeneity, (3) find that rejections with explanations have a much stronger effect than rejections without explanations, and (4) find that contributors adjust their idea types following a rejection. These findings suggest that organizations can use rejections to signal to contributors that they pay attention to their submissions, thus fostering motivation and providing guidance in the failure-prone search for new ideas. (joint work with Henning Piezunka from INSEAD)
Bio: Linus Dahlander is an associate professor with tenure at ESMT Berlin. His research investigates how new ideas and innovations are developed in networks and communities. The ongoing projects use large-scale analysis of networks, which he integrates with a deeper appreciation for what content flows through networks. His research has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Research Policy, and Strategic Management Journal among others. He also served as an Associate Editor for the Academy of Management Journal between 2013-2016.
A buffet lunch will be available at 11:45 a.m., and the seminar will begin at 12:00 p.m.
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