Crowding-Out or Crowding-In? The Effects of Idea Evaluation on Evaluators’ Idea Generation

Organizations rely on their employees to produce many high-quality ideas for the improvement of products, processes, and strategies. Evaluators such as managers and technical experts need to not only assess these ideas but also face expectations to contribute ideas of their own. We investigate this task duality by asking how idea evaluation activities affect evaluators’ ideation performance. Although much of the creativity and innovation literature points to a crowding-out effect, some theoretic