The Influence of Coalition Formation on Idea Selection in Dispersed Teams: A Game Theoretic Approach

In an open innovation environment, organizational learning takes place by means of dispersed teams which expand their knowledge through collaborative idea generation. Research is often focused on finding ways to extend the set of ideas, while the main problem in our opinion is not the number of ideas that is generated, but a non-optimal set of ideas accepted during idea selection. When selecting ideas, coalitions form and their composition may influence the resulting set of accepted ideas. We expect that computing coalitional strength during idea selection will help in forming the right teams to have a grand coalition, or having a better allocation of accepted ideas, or neutralising factors that adversely influence the decision making process. Based on a literature survey, this paper proposes the application of the Shapley value and the nucleolus to compute coalitional strength in order to enhance the group decision making process during collaborative idea selection. This document does not represent the opinion of the European Union, and the European Union is not responsible for any use that might be made of its content.