Organizations increasingly use corporate online ideation platforms to foster individual innovativeness. Recent research, however, has shown the downside of such contests—the selection of ideas is not entirely rational. Analyzing the impact of content scarcity, which occurs when ideators provide very little issue‐relevant information when submitting ideas, contributes to this new literature stream. The main argument is that evaluators increasingly rely on heuristics based on issue‐irrelevant information when content scarcity obstructs reflective decision‐making. The default‐interventionist model of decision‐making in combination with the Yale attitude change approach allows us to examine the mechanisms evaluators apply when content scarcity occurs. The hypotheses are tested on an extensive data set of 3025 ideas. The results show that content scarcity affects the evaluators' decision‐making process by preventing them from intervening their first intuitive decision. The scarcer the content of the submitted idea, the stronger the persuasiveness of issue‐irrelevant aspects that affect idea selection: aspects of the ideator, message, and community.

Incubation of organisations by corporate incubators is currently regaining attention as a key way to foster innovation. However, understanding of how corporate incubators affect employee’s innovative behaviour in the host company is still limited. This study aims to fill this gap by examining the relationship between corporate incubator influence and innovative work behaviour and how this is moderated by innovation climate. Using a multi-level regression with 1,202 participants nested in 100 organisational units of a large, international company, the study shows that corporate incubators and innovation climate significantly affect innovative work behaviour. Further, we found that shared and individual perceptions of innovation climate moderate incubator influence differently. In order to improve innovative work behaviour, corporate incubators can compensate a weak innovation climate while strengthening the impact of individual perceptions of innovation climate on innovative behaviour, which introduces new ways of how companies are able to improve their innovativeness.

Established companies are increasingly challenged to expand their innovation development capabilities and to align them to increasingly ambidextrous requirements. A currently popular way for companies to meet these requirements is corporate incubators. Successfully designing such units imposes specific challenges on companies, which results in large numbers of different corporate incubator types spanning a wide range of activities. This group of very different incubation concepts is not only very difficult to manage from a practical perspective, it is also complex to reliably explore from a research perspective. In this study, we therefore examine how incubators can be comprehensively categorised and how different objectives and strategies relate to corporate incubator performance. Results from cluster and regression analysis of a sample of incubators from 14 different industries reveal 16 clusters dependent on five objective and five strategy criteria. The criteria have a diverse relation to performance which can be explained using transactional distance theory.

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Employees' innovative behaviour becomes increasingly important for organizational success. Companies try to improve their innovation capabilities by supporting and motivating employees to show innovative behaviour. Particularly online ideation platforms become relevant because they create new opportunities for employees to be innovative. This paper investigates how exposure to online ideation platforms' unique capabilities stimulates intrinsic motivation toward innovative behaviour and ultimately the submission of high‐quality ideas. Based on expectancy and channel expansion theories, we derive a framework with four intrinsic motivational forces that online ideation platforms can stimulate. A two‐study approach empirically tests this framework. The first study uses a multilevel regression on a dataset of 1630 employees nested in 136 departments of a leading international science and technology company. The second study analyses how 279 employees of the same company, who submitted 678 ideas on the company's online ideation platform, continue to be motivated by the platform's inherent characteristics and capabilities and submit high‐quality ideas. The results support the core argument that online ideation platforms stimulate certain desires motivating employees to engage in innovative behaviour and ultimately submit high‐quality ideas. The detailed results offer several contributions to innovation management literature and beyond.