Who wins in crowd innovation contests

Open innovation researchers are interested in understanding which participants in participatory settings such as innovation contests make the “best” contributions. Drawing on the componential model of creativity and data generated in innovation contests by car manufacturer Porsche and food company Ritter Sport, we analyze the effect of participants’ creativity, domain knowledge, and several motivational factors on the innovativeness of their contributions. Except for intrinsic and reputation-based motivation, we find all of these factors affect the innovativeness of an idea. However, regarding generating incremental or radical innovations, some factors have opposing roles. In particular, our results showed that extrinsic and internalized extrinsic motivation have opposite influences, which calls for fine-grained analyses of motivational factors. Our findings imply that innovation managers must decide which type of innovations they intend to generate and then design contests to attract participants with th...