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Idea evaluation by citizens : the Hamburg Fab City Maker Challenge case
Citation Link: https://doi.org/10.15480/882.4972
Publikationstyp
Book Part
Date Issued
2022-12
Sprache
English
Institut
TORE-DOI
Start Page
91
End Page
95
Citation
dtec.bw-Beiträge der Helmut-Schmidt-Universität. - (1) 91-95 (12-2022)
Publisher DOI
Publisher
Helmut-Schmidt-Universität, Bibliothek
Experts play an important role in the evaluation of ideas. Owing to their experience and knowledge, they are believed to be best suited to objectively evaluate ideas. At the same time, expert evaluations sometimes fail to accurately reflect stakeholder preferences. For this reason, more and more organizations have begun to solicit ‘non-expert’ evaluations from the ‘crowd’ (e.g., via community voting). We illustrate how
organizations can involve stakeholders in idea evaluation in the context of the Fab City project. Integrating citizens into the innovation process is particularly interesting in a Fab City–a city that produces many of the products it needs locally–since it enables one to develop regional preferences into tailored solutions. Here, citizens evaluate a solution, implement it as a local product, and ultimately share the design (mostly open-source) within the community. In the course of a Fab City initiative in Hamburg–the Maker Challenge–citizens were invited to evaluate almost 100 innovative ideas in pairwise comparisons. We draw on over 20,000 votes from around 400 citizen judges to assess the crowd opinion formation process. Unlike in other studies, our data allow us to measure the time every citizen judge needed to make their decision. Thus, we can conclude how diligent citizen judges are and, conversely, how much attention an idea can attract. Looking at the citizen judges’
evaluation times, it appears that, in most cases, the opinion-formation process is spontaneous. In a few cases, however, a substantial amount of time is spent. All the evaluation times followed a Poisson distribution. Further, we compare expert evaluations with crowd evaluations and relate the results to the literature. We conclude that the crowd evaluation process resembles the expert evaluation process. Also, we show that
citizens optimize their cognitive effort over time. For real-world cases, such as the Fab City project, this implies that not only the ideation process and the implementation process can be carried out by local citizens, but also that the evaluation can be done within a community without significant loss of quality, but with much lower effort on the part of organizers.
organizations can involve stakeholders in idea evaluation in the context of the Fab City project. Integrating citizens into the innovation process is particularly interesting in a Fab City–a city that produces many of the products it needs locally–since it enables one to develop regional preferences into tailored solutions. Here, citizens evaluate a solution, implement it as a local product, and ultimately share the design (mostly open-source) within the community. In the course of a Fab City initiative in Hamburg–the Maker Challenge–citizens were invited to evaluate almost 100 innovative ideas in pairwise comparisons. We draw on over 20,000 votes from around 400 citizen judges to assess the crowd opinion formation process. Unlike in other studies, our data allow us to measure the time every citizen judge needed to make their decision. Thus, we can conclude how diligent citizen judges are and, conversely, how much attention an idea can attract. Looking at the citizen judges’
evaluation times, it appears that, in most cases, the opinion-formation process is spontaneous. In a few cases, however, a substantial amount of time is spent. All the evaluation times followed a Poisson distribution. Further, we compare expert evaluations with crowd evaluations and relate the results to the literature. We conclude that the crowd evaluation process resembles the expert evaluation process. Also, we show that
citizens optimize their cognitive effort over time. For real-world cases, such as the Fab City project, this implies that not only the ideation process and the implementation process can be carried out by local citizens, but also that the evaluation can be done within a community without significant loss of quality, but with much lower effort on the part of organizers.
DDC Class
500: Naturwissenschaften
620: Ingenieurwissenschaften
Funding Organisations
Digitalization and Technology Research Center of the Bundeswehr (dtec.bw)
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