Exploring the Role of Learning in Crowdsourcing Creativity: The Value of IdeaBuilding in the Crowd

Crowds usually consist of novices who do not possess sufficient domain knowledge to fully exercise their creativity in open calls. This paper explores a new outlet where crowds can learn from each other to gain task-relevant knowledge and therefore provides empirical evidence to justify the increasing prevalence of crowd collaboration. An online experiment was conducted to compare creativity performances from three settings: 1) when ideas are generated by crowds, and 2) when crowd members build on each other’s ideas, and 3) when ideas are generated by experts. Our findings suggest that for tasks that crowd members do not initially have the necessary knowledge to complete, they can learn from each other for the relevant knowledge. As a result, the inherently diverse nature of crowds can lead to outcomes that are comparable with the outcomes produced by experts.