Does collaboration among participants lead to better ideas in IT-based idea competitions? An empirical investigation

Ivo Blohm, Ulrich Bretschneider, Jan Marco Leimeister and Helmut Krcmar (krcmar@in.tum.de)

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2011, vol. 9, issue 2, 106-122

Abstract: Open innovation research shows that idea competitions are a promising approach for integrating customers and that most innovations are a result of intensive collaboration (Franke and Shah, 2003; Gasco-Hernandez and Torres-Coronas, 2004; Nemiro, 2001; Sawhney et al., 2005). Thus, fostering collaboration among idea contributors might be a fruitful approach for unleashing the customers' entire creative potential and making idea competitions even more successful. This paper reports on a field study in which idea contributors could collaborate in an IT-based idea competition using the wiki technology. We tested whether user collaboration positively influences the quality of the submissions applying an in-depth analysis of idea quality. Our results show that user collaboration enhances idea quality and that inducing user collaboration is a viable design element for making idea competitions more effective. This contributes to a more successful design, implementation and operation of idea competitions, as well as to better outcomes. The article concludes with a discussion of customer groups collaborating in idea competitions (extrinsically and intrinsically motivated customers).

Keywords: idea competitions; collaboration; open innovation; crowdsourcing; toolkits; software development; user innovation; new product development; R&D; research and development; creative potential; creativity; wiki technology; idea quality; customer groups; information technology. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijnvor:v:9:y:2011:i:2:p:106-122

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