Radical and incremental solutions by marginal solvers in a broadcast search

For many firms innovation is a core method for gaining competitive advantage, but the speed of innovation is steadily increasing. Luckily, the spread of cheap internet has contributed to new ways in which firms can innovate. One of these methods, broadcast search, a form of crowdsourcing, can be a powerful tool to solve specific problems that firms are not able to solve themselves. Although crowdsourcing in general and broadcast search in particular are gaining traction as viable business strategies, they are not yet fully understood. In broadcast search, for example, it is known that more distant solvers (also called marginal solvers) are more likely to propose high quality solutions, but it is not yet clearly understood why that is.