Verbal Personification of Creative Briefs: Improving Participants' Individual Creative Performance in Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a powerful approach for generating ideas and fostering open innovation. But participants' creativity is sometimes weak. Personification, in which non‐living things are presented as human, particularly through verbal personification, is often used in the arts and sciences to enhance imagination and understanding. In crowdsourcing, the verbal personification of creative briefs could improve participants' individual creative ideation fluency (the quantity of ideas). Four experimental studies in crowdsourcing examined the effects on creativity fluency of different verbal personification types: physical versus mental, weak versus strong anthropomorphism, weak anthropomorphism with high physical orientation and weak anthropomorphism with high mental orientation. Our results highlight the role of verbal personification on creativity fluency. Verbal personification that focuses on physical characteristics only, or that combines mental and physical characteristics, but with physical dominance, is more effective for creativity fluency. Too strong focus on mental dimensions hinders the effectiveness of a personified brief. We thus contribute to the literature on creativity and innovation management. We discuss these results for their theoretical implications. For practitioners, we provide useful information to help them design briefs that make crowdsourcing campaigns more effective. We also discuss some limitations of the work and avenues for further research.