Crowd Filter

A Level-4 open-innovation strategy simulation set at Aurena Group AG, a Hamburg-based EUR 2.6bn consumer-products firm whose public crowdsourcing platform “Aurena Open” has 180,000 contributors but a pipeline gone incremental. The board wants the next challenge to surface and fund a genuinely distant, category-breaking idea — yet the firm has a documented habit of filtering out exactly those ideas. Over four rounds you run the open-innovation funnel and discover the central paradox of crowdsourcing (Dahlander & Piezunka): the binding constraint is not idea generation but ATTENTION. Round 1 — diagnose where in the funnel distant ideas die and define a working measure of idea distance. Round 2 — frame the crowdsourcing call: a narrow on-brand prompt yields 4,000 tidy near ideas; an open provocative prompt yields fewer but far more distant submissions at the cost of triage difficulty; incentives and submission format (free-form vs templated) further shape volume vs novelty. Round 3 — allocate the binding attention budget: only 120 of the 4,000 submissions can be deeply reviewed (3%). Choose the triage mechanism (crowd-vote ranking favours the familiar; homogeneous expert cherry-picking reproduces “looks-like-us” narrowing; a deliberate distance-aware mechanism protects attention for outliers), the share of the 120 slots quarantined for high-novelty outliers, and the diversity of the review panel — each changes the distant-idea capture rate. Round 4 — allocate the EUR 6,000,000 development budget across a safe near idea (EUR 4M credible case, low novelty) and a distant idea (EUR 20M upside, high uncertainty, lukewarm sponsor), deciding whether to stage/pilot the moonshot (real-options de-risking) and how hard to win over the reluctant sponsor. The engine encodes the real tensions so wrong strategies underperform: a narrow call caps the distant ideas that can ever enter; crowd-vote or homogeneous-expert triage with no reserved slots drops the capture rate to ~4%; funding only the near idea defeats the board mandate; betting the whole EUR 6M unstaged on the moonshot risks the budget and the EUR 4M/year platform. Tracks Distant-Idea Capture Rate, Average Novelty of the reviewed pool, Suggestions Deeply Reviewed, Innovation Value (EUR), Budget Allocated, and Platform Status. Teaches distant vs local search, attention as the scarce resource to be budgeted, absorptive capacity and diverse reviewers, and real-options funding of novelty.