Microfoundations of Novelty Evaluation: The Interplay Between Novel Ideas and their Audiences

Novel ideas, products, and technologies are critical for economic growth and firm competitiveness. However, many ideas do not reach the implementation stage because key audiences are not able, or not willing, to endow them with the resources they need to be developed. In this symposium, we seek to shed light on the evaluative processes that lead to the acceptance (or rejection) of novelty broadly conceived, the intra-audience dynamics that shape individuals’ judgment, as well as the consequences of such processes for innovators themselves. The four papers in this symposium explore the motivations that lead individuals to abandon (or not) their novel ideas as a consequence of the feedback they receive from key stakeholders, the way evaluations are affected by the presentation sequence of novel ideas, and the intra-audience factors that lead individuals to evaluate novel ideas in different ways. Our goal is to encourage future research to further explore the relationships between novel ideas and their target audiences, with particular attention to the microfoundations of evaluators’ judgment.