Bring them aboard: Rewarding participation in technology-mediated citizen science projects

Monetary and Social Rewards for Crowdsourcing

“…However, previous literature focused primarily on crowdsourcing taxonomies [75], on what types of contributions people are more prone to propose [24,69], on the quality of crowdsourcing contributions relatively to internal research and development (R&D) outcomes [21], on the best individuals to involve [70,71,76] and on analyzing best practices to manage the campaigns [77][78][79][80], without detailing the effects of different kinds of rewards to effectively increase the number of ideas submitted. In particular, we focused on the analysis of the effects on the number of contributions collected brought about by boosting extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, which are the main determinants for crowd participation in volunteer activities like crowdsourcing [29,37], through the use of rewards. In fact, as it happens in other crowd-inclusion phenomena aimed at scientific advancement, including citizen science and open source communities, individuals involved in crowdsourcing may participate in return for a reward and due to self-interest [33,71,81,82].…”

“…In fact, as it happens in other crowd-inclusion phenomena aimed at scientific advancement, including citizen science and open source communities, individuals involved in crowdsourcing may participate in return for a reward and due to self-interest [33,71,81,82]. In the first instance, people join a campaign because they are extrinsically motivated, i.e., they contribute in return for some form of personal reward, while in the latter case, participation is realized by leveraging intrinsic motivation, e.g., enjoyment in performing the task or the satisfaction of contributing to a social cause [10,32,34,37]. Therefore, companies may leverage both kinds of motivations through the use of rewards, thereby enabling companies to collect a greater number of contributions and subsequently increasing the quality of extreme outcomes.…”

“…Crowdsourcing participants, as in other crowd-based projects, are motivated in two different ways: Leveraging extrinsic and intrinsic motivations [32][33][34]. The former category is related to individuals contributing with the expectation of some kind of return [14,35], while the latter is connected to self-determination based on a social cause without any immediate benefit for the contributors [32,36,37]. Therefore, individuals participate because they wish to be rewarded monetarily, or because they enjoy sharing their ideas to achieve a goal that will benefit society, or for both of the aforementioned reasons.…”

“…While previous research investigated the impact of rewards to encourage participation in open source communities or citizen science initiatives [39][40][41][42], the goal of this study was to analyze the impact of different types of rewards, i.e., based on money and social cause, on the number of contributions in "crowdsourcing of inventive activities" campaigns. In addition, we provide a theoretical grounding for the effects brought about by increasing extrinsic and intrinsic motivations through rewards in crowdsourcing, based on fairness expectation and self-determination theories [32,36,37,[43][44][45][46][47]. Moreover, in this study, we analyzed the effect of each type of reward when both kinds of rewards are present.…”

SDGs and Innovation in the Business Context Literature Review

“…From the analysis of literature, it emerges that innovation could be configured not only as an objective to be pursued, but also as a prerequisite for implementing the changes (in all areas) necessary for the pursuit of SDGs. Consistent with the need of adopting cooperative strategies at all levels (as hoped for by SDG 17), contrary to the neoliberal model of competitiveness that restrains the adoption of the SDGs [39], some works have focused their interest on open innovation like one of the most important forms of collaboration in the industrial context, starting from the idea-generation phase [97,98] (also with the help and participation of citizens [99,100]) and from the start-up phase [101], up to the development [102][103][104] and patenting process [105][106][107][108][109] and trying to measure it [109,110]. Other innovative forms of collaboration and knowledge sharing that can aid in the achievement of sustainability are represented by open-source intelligence tools [111].…”