On the Effectiveness of Minisum Approval Voting in an Open Strategy Setting: An Agent-Based Approach

TL;DR

This paper uses agent-based simulation to examine how expanding participant diversity in open strategy processes affects organizational performance, showing larger crowds can lead to better strategies in complex environments.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the impact of participant diversity in open strategy, highlighting the conditions under which larger crowds improve organizational outcomes.

Findings

Larger, diverse crowds lead to higher peaks in performance landscapes.

Small increases in participants do not significantly improve strategy discovery.

Diverse participation accelerates the identification of better strategies.

Abstract

This work researches the impact of including a wider range of participants in the strategy-making process on the performance of organizations which operate in either moderately or highly complex environments. Agent-based simulation demonstrates that the increased number of ideas generated from larger and diverse crowds and subsequent preference aggregation lead to rapid discovery of higher peaks in the organization's performance landscape. However, this is not the case when the expansion in the number of participants is small. The results confirm the most frequently mentioned benefit in the Open Strategy literature: the discovery of better performing strategies.