High-speed idea filtering with the bag of lemons

Abstract

Open innovation platforms (web sites where crowds post ideas in a shared space) enable us to elicit huge volumes of potentially valuable solutions for problems we care about, but identifying the best ideas in these collections can be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. This paper presents an approach, called the “bag of lemons”, which enables crowd to filter ideas with accuracy superior to conventional (Likert scale) rating approaches, but in only a fraction of the time. The key insight behind this approach is that crowds are much better at eliminating bad ideas than at identifying good ones. Keywords: Collective intelligence; Open innovation; Social computing; Idea filtering