Corporate Nudging and Employee Idea Development

Increasingly, organizations rely on the creative capacities of all staff members to bring forth ideas to solve organizational problems and to develop new products or services. However, there is increasing evidence that the monetary incentives commonly used to promote idea development amongst employees can have negative effects on innovation. We focus on the effect of non-monetary rewards and introduce the concept of corporate nudging to design managerial interventions that stimulate the willingness of employees to develop ideas and to exhort effort while doing so. These corporate nudges are applied during an innovation challenge in which employees are allocated to four distinct experimental conditions, creating a randomized controlled trail with a 2x2 design. The randomized controlled trail allows us to examine the extent to which corporate nudging leads employee idea development. In addition, we evaluate the extent to which it affects the quality of the idea development through managerial evaluations of the quality of the ideas.