The effect of anonymity in idea evaluation

We studied the effects of anonymity on the outcome of idea evaluations within the context of organizational ideation. Due to the rising popularity of topics like open innovation and knowledge of the crowd research on the subject of ideation in general and idea evaluation in specific is becoming more important. Response Bias is a known problem in Idea Evaluation. Evaluations are influenced by, for example, Social Desirability Effects and Rater Bias. Research shows that response bias can negatively affect the validity of results between 10% and 75%. Organizations that are using idea evaluations in there innovation or ideation strategy rely on the outcome of these evaluations for there future strategy. Therefor it is important for these organizations to be aware of the effect of response bias and to take steps for eliminating these biases. One of the known methods of eliminating response bias is anonymity and more specific, in the context of idea evaluation, the anonymity of both ideator and evaluator. In this study we have researched the influence of anonymity of both the ideator and evaluator on the Crowd Evaluation Score. We have conducted a field experiment in two organizations. We collected 863 idea evaluations which we used for analysis. Our study shows that there is an interaction effect between the anonymity of both ideator and evaluator. We have found that the Crowd Evaluation Score is considerably lower when an evaluation is completely anonymous.