دانلود رایگان مقاله بهره برداری از پتانسیل کسب و کار نوآورانه از مسابقات نوآوری

Abstract

Innovation contests are increasingly used by businesses to identify new ideas for better servicing their customers; yet, the degree to which the innovation contests provide new ideas has been disappointing. We describe the case of a large innovation contest via which we examined the role of three elements of the online discussion context to predict whether innovative ideas are generated during the contest. The three elements are: (1) the discussion thread’s amount of variety (i.e., variation of participants’ familiarity with the topic or organizational background), (2) the amount of collaborative versus argumentative posts that have been made in the discussion prior to a contributor’s innovative post, and (3) whether the discussion includes previous posts from the participant prior to the innovative post. We found three ideal profiles for a person generating innovative ideas: (1) he or she posts after participants who have substantial variation in familiarity with the topic, (2) he/she posts on discussion threads in which participants focus their contributions on adding their own perspectives, not on arguing with others, and (3) he/she has not previously posted. These findings lead to specific implications for managing innovation contests.

6. Conclusion Innovation contests are a critical mechanism for implementing open-innovation strategies in firms today. Conducting these contests properly will help determine if new innovations can be derived from the crowd. Heeding our three guidelines should improve the likelihood that contributions from the crowd will be novel and implementable for the firm.