Person:

Riedl, Christoph

Central to any innovation process is the evaluation of proposed projects and allocation of resources. We investigate whether novel research projects, those deviating from existing research paradigms, are treated with a negative bias in expert evaluations. We analyze the results of a peer review process for medical research grant proposals at a leading medical research university, in which we recruited 142 expert university faculty members to evaluate 150 submissions, resulting in 2,130 randomly-assigned proposal-evaluator pair observations. Our results confirm a systematic penalty for novel proposals; a standard deviation increase in novelty drops the expected rank of a proposal by 4.5 percentile points. This discounting is robust to various controls for unobserved proposal quality and alternative explanations. Additional tests suggest information effects rather than strategic effects account for the novelty penalty. Only a minority of the novelty penalty could be related to perceptions of lesser feasibility of novel proposals.

Online collaborative platforms have emerged as a complementary approach to traditional organizations for coordinating the collective efforts of creative workers. However, it is surprising that they result in any productive output as individuals often work without direct monetary incentives while collaborating with unknown others. In this paper, we distinguish the conditions necessary for eliciting effort from those affecting the quality of interdependent teamwork. We consider the role of incentives versus social processes in catalyzing collaboration. We test our hypotheses using a unique data set of 260 individuals randomly assigned to 52 teams tasked with developing working solutions to a complex innovation problem over 10 days, with varying monetary incentives. We find that levels of effort are driven by cash incentives and the presence of other interacting teammates. The level of collaboration, by contrast, was not sensitive to cash incentives. Instead, individuals increased their communication if teammates were also actively participating. Additionally, team performance is uniquely driven by the level of emergent interdependence, as indexed by the diversity of topics discussed and the temporal coordination of activity in short focused time periods. Our results contribute to the literature on how alternative organizational forms can be designed to solve complex innovation tasks.