The Dual Role of Prior Ideas in Driving Creative Performance in Open Ideation Contests

We investigate the influence of prior ideas on solvers’ creative performance in online open ideation contests. In three lab studies and an empirical analysis of a large-scale dataset from a European ideation platform, we find evidence for two opposing effects of prior ideas. First, more prior ideas stimulate memory more broadly leading to greater creative performance. Second, more prior ideas signal greater competition hereby reducing creative performance. We show that the latter negative effect of prior ideas can be reduced if prior ideas are displayed in an aggregated way, which keeps their informational value but reduces the visibility of competition.