Walking Parallel Paths or Taking the Same Road? The Effect of Collaborative Incentives in Innovation Contests

Abstract

We examine the role of participants' interactions in innovation contests. In contrast to the dominant view of a competitive organisation of innovation contests, we suggest that, especially for ideation projects, a collaborative setting may be beneficial in terms of the amount of ideation activity and the quality of the generated ideas. Using two experiments, we show the usefulness of a collaborative approach when two particular conditions are met: first, the overall effort must be compensated according to performance criteria in such a way that participants are aware of the impact of their actions. Thus, the reward mechanism has to ensure that all contributors to a specific idea benefit from their involvement. Second, the host has to provide feedback throughout the contest to make it clear for participants what idea(s) to focus on. Our results show that, while the elaboration effort can be increased by introducing a collaborative reward mechanism alone, the best results are achieved when both conditions are met. Int. J. Innov. Mgt. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO on 11/26/16. For personal use only. Int. J. Innov. Mgt. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO on 11/26/16. For personal use only.

Design principles for establishing a multi-sided open innovation platform: lessons learned from an action research study in the medical technology industry

“…In this context, as a boundary condition, knowledge about the skills and interests of the addressees is required for realizing effective communication. The existing literature supports this proposed principle, highlighting the importance of the solver-oriented design of innovation challenges (Hossain 2018;Martinez and Walton 2014;Sieg et al 2010) and their selective promotion (Boss et al 2017;Fichter 2009;Zhu et al 2019).…”

“…Existing bodies of literature regarding platform-based open innovation have covered different topics, including activities to effectively match innovation and knowledge demand with supply (Brunswicker and Hutschek 2010;Gatzweiler et al 2017;Randhawa et al 2018). The design of the reward structure with monetary prizes and further incentives is an additional topic of interest (Antikainen Design principles for establishing a multi-sided open innovation platform: lessons learned from an action... Boss et al 2017;Ihl et al 2018). Furthermore, research analyzed capabilities for motivating and supporting participants to contribute to open innovation (e.g., Brunswicker and Hutschek 2010;Randhawa et al 2017Randhawa et al , 2018.…”