Success of New Ideas in Online Platforms: An Idea Network Perspective

On online platforms, new ideas often emerge by recombining existing ones within idea networks. Unlike traditional knowledge networks, idea networks represent curated, meaning-based associations among ideas, offering a distinct lens on recombination. Drawing upon a hypergraph perspective, we investigate how new idea success depends on their structural and content attributes, and how collaborative participation shapes these attributes. Using data from an ideation platform, we find that both structural embeddedness and bridging benefit new idea success. Content diversity has no direct effect, but it amplifies the benefits of bridging while constraining those of embeddedness. Both crowd contributions and ideator expertise strengthen ideas’ structural positions, whereas they shape content diversity in opposite ways: crowd contributions increase diversity, while ideator expertise reduces it through selective integration. These findings advance research on networks, recombination, and online collaboration by showing how structure, content, and collaborative participation jointly shape new idea success.