Are you judging me or my idea? How feedback impacts future idea success in web-based idea management systems

Companies increasingly rely on web-based idea management systems (IMS) to source innovative ideas from their employees and external contributors. While existing research emphasizes the critical role of expert feedback in shaping ideators' subsequent contributions, there remains a limited understanding of how various types of feedback—and their interplay—affect future idea success. Grounded in feedback intervention theory, this study examines how success feedback (task-level), idea-related failure feedback (task-level), and ideator-related failure feedback (self-level) affect future idea success through shifting ideators' attention and activating different processes. Furthermore, we investigate the moderating roles of feedback readability and timing. Study 1 analyzes 1143 ideas submitted over 5 years by shopfloor employees of an automotive company, while Study 2 examines the causal effects and the underlying processes through an online experiment. The findings reveal that success feedback and constructive idea-related failure feedback significantly enhance future idea success by activating task motivation and task learning, respectively, while ideator-related failure feedback shows diminishing returns by activating the meta-task process. Additionally, lower feedback readability weakens the positive impact of idea-related failure feedback; however, no significant moderating effect is found for feedback timing. Our research contributes to the IMS literature by demonstrating how different feedback types uniquely influence future idea success. Practically, our findings highlight that experts and managers should prioritize feedback on ideas rather than ideators when providing IMS guidance.