Professor Linus Dahlander of the University of Bath will be discussing the following paper:

"Seeking causal evidence of how the relationship between proposers and evaluators affects idea evaluation outcomes, our field experiment manipulates the process in which innovation managers evaluate ideas proposed by their colleagues in a large multinational company. We vary the information that the managers receive on the proposers, creating two conditions: (1) a blind evaluation, where managers receive no proposer information, and (2) a non-blind evaluation, where they receive the proposer’s name, organisational unit, and location. We analyse how blind evaluation changes scores and whether the effect depends on order, gender, organisational unit, and location. We find little evidence that blinding substantially changes idea evaluations, discuss how the non-finding may arise, and how it enriches knowledge on corporate idea evaluations."