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Vol. 26, No. 1, January 2017, pp. 80–99 10.1111/poms.12613

DOI
ISSN 1059-1478|EISSN 1937-5956|17|2601|0080 © 2016 Production and Operations Management Society

Idea Generation and the Role of Feedback: Evidence

from Field Experiments with Innovation Tournaments
Joel O. Wooten
Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina 29208, USA, joel.wooten@moore.sc.edu

Karl T. Ulrich
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA, ulrich@wharton.upenn.edu

I n many innovation settings, ideas are generated over time and managers face a decision about if and how to provide
in-process feedback to the idea generators about the quality of submissions. In this article, we use design contests
allowing repeated entry to examine the effect of in-process feedback on idea generation. We report on a set of field exper-
iments using two online contest websites to compare the performance of three different feedback treatments—no feedback,
random feedback, and directed feedback (i.e., in-process feedback highly correlated with the final quality rating of the