Consumer Creativity in Product Design: The Effects of Providing a Default Product on Idea Generation

From the widespread practice of product customization to the recent practice of “crowdsourcing” ideas, companies are actively involving consumers in the new product development process. To benefit from the input of consumers as well as professionals, companies could provide consumers with a professionally designed default product that may serve as a starting point in the idea-generation process for new products or product improvements. Providing a default product has been shown to impact the consumers’ utility (Dellaert and Stremersch, 2005) and evaluation of self-designed products (Moreau and Herd, 2010), but no research has investigated the effects of providing a default product on consumer creativity. In this paper, we investigate the moderating effect of the product design goal on the relationship between the level of advancement of the provided default product and the creativity of the generated product ideas. Based on contemporary creative cognition research, we can envision two contrasting effects of the provision of a default product in the consumer’s idea generation process: 1) it may enhance creativity when the existing features of the default product activate relevant domain knowledge and stimulate a more thorough exploration of the idea space (Rietzschel, Nijstad, and Stroebe, 2007) or 2) it may inhibit creativity when the default product fixates attention too much on the existing product features and limits the exploration of the idea space (Smith, Ward, and Schumacher, 1993). We hypothesize that the combination of the level of advancement of the default, i.e., the number of already incorporated features, and the product design goal determines whether the default product will stimulate or inhibit the generation of creative product ideas.