Ideation contests: Crowd management and valorization to avoid negative feelings of participants

This study seeks to understand the managerial consequences of involving users in the innovation process and focuses on how to avoid contestants' negative feelings by dealing with increasingly more informed participants in crowdsourcing contests. Using a qualitative approach confronting participants' and managers' perspectives, the findings reveal a gap between how companies intend to manage their relationships with participants, what they actually do, and how this affects participants' feelings. Three sources of negative feelings emerge from the data and must be dealt with: (1) information regarding the future use of contributions and overpromising, (2) sharing intellectual property rights, and (3) prise allocation and selection criteria. As the increasing empowerment of participants requires rethinking the participant–brand relationship in online crowdsourcing, the results provide guidelines for effective relationship building in creative contests by identifying three types of needed recognition from the consumers' side, which refer to three hierarchical levels of participant valorization from the managers' side: basic, contribution and social recognition.