Improving Crowd Innovation with Expert Facilitation

Online crowds are a promising source of new innovations. However, crowd innovation quality does not always match its quantity. In this paper, we explore how to improve crowd innovation with real-time expert guidance. One approach would for experts to provide personalized feedback, but this scales poorly, and may lead to premature convergence during creative work. Drawing on strategies for facilitating face-to-face brainstorms, we introduce a crowd ideation system where experts monitor incoming ideas through a dashboard and offer high-level "inspirations" to guide ideation. A series of controlled experiments show that experienced facilitators increased the quantity and creativity of workers' ideas compared to unfacilitated workers, while Novice facilitators reduced workers' creativity. Analyses of inspiration strategies suggest these opposing results stem from differential use of successful inspiration strategies (e.g., provoking mental simulations). The results show that expert facilitation can significantly improve crowd innovation, but inexperienced facilitators may need scaffolding to be successful.