Walking parallel paths or taking the same road? : The effect of collaborative incentives in innovation contests

Publikationstyp
Book Part
Date Issued
2019-04
Sprache
English
Author(s)
Boss, Viktoria  
Kleer, Robin  
Vossen, Alexander  
Institut
Unternehmertum W-11  
TORE-URI
http://hdl.handle.net/11420/8771
First published in
Series on technology management  
Number in series
32
Start Page
111
End Page
144
Citation
Managing innovation: Series on technology management 32: 111-144 (2019)
Publisher DOI
10.1142/9781786346490_0005
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85068058017
Publisher
World Scientific Publishing Europe Ltd.
All rights rerserved. 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.
Subjects
collaboration
incentives
Innovation contest
DDC Class
330: Wirtschaft