Crowdsourcing without profit: the role of the seeker in open social innovation

Crowdsourcing has increasingly been studied as an open innovation (OI) mechanism by which organizations (seekers) engage with an external crowd of potential solvers. Previous crowdsourcing research has focused on solvers and their individual motivations, providing few insights as to why and how seekers use crowdsourcing, and how these choices affect the value that might be realized from these efforts. Prior research has also emphasized profit‐seeking firms, despite the use of OI practices by public sector organizations to achieve societal benefits. This paper examines the organizational and project‐level choices of government agencies that crowdsource from citizens to drive open social innovation, and thus develop new ways to address societal problems, a process sometimes termed ‘citizensourcing.’ Using rich data from 18 local government seekers that use the same intermediary, we develop a model of seeker crowdsourcing implementation that links a previously unstudied variance in seeker intent and engagement strategies to differences in project team motivation and capabilities, in turn leading to varying online engagement behaviors and ultimately project outcomes. Our study compares and contrasts governmental and corporate crowdsourcing to reveal that the non‐pecuniary orientation of both seekers and solvers means that the motives of government crowdsourcing are fundamentally different from corporate crowdsourcing, but the process in our sample more closely resembles that of a firm‐sponsored community rather than government sponsored contests. More generally, we show how seeker organizational factors and choices shape project‐level implementation and success of crowdsourcing efforts, as well as provide insights for OI activities of other smaller, geographically bound organizations.     

“To Own or Not to Own?” A Study on the Determinants and Consequences of Alternative Intellectual Property Rights Arrangements in Crowdsourcing for Innovation Contests

Firms are increasingly engaging in crowdsourcing for innovation to access new knowledge beyond their boundaries; however, scholars are no closer to understanding what guides seeker firms in deciding the level at which to acquire rights from solvers and the effect that this decision has on the performance of crowdsourcing contests. Integrating property rights theory and the problem‐solving perspective while leveraging exploratory interviews and observations, we build a theoretical framework to examine how specific attributes of the technical problem broadcast by firms affect the seekers’ choice between alternative intellectual property rights (IPR) arrangements that call for acquiring or licensing‐in IPR from external solvers (i.e., with high and low degrees of ownership, respectively). Each technical problem differs in the knowledge required to be solved as well as in the stage of development of the innovation process and seeker firms pay great attention to such characteristics when deciding about the IPR arrangement they choose for their contests. In addition, we analyze how this choice between acquiring and licensing‐in IPR, in turn, influences the performance of the contest. We empirically test our hypotheses analyzing a unique dataset of 729 challenges broadcast on the InnoCentive platform from 2010 to 2016. Our results indicate that challenges related to technical problems in later stages of the innovation process are positively related to the seekers’ preference toward IPR arrangements with a high level of ownership, while technical problems involving a higher number of knowledge domains are not. Moreover, we found that IPR arrangements with a high level of ownership negatively affect solvers’ participation and that IPR arrangement play a mediating role between the attributes of the technical problem and the solvers’ self‐selection process. Our paper contributes to the open innovation and crowdsourcing literature and provides practical implications for both managers and contest organizers.     

Absorbing knowledge in the digital age: the key role of integration mechanisms in the context of crowdsourcing for innovation

The digital age offers unprecedented opportunities for firms to access new knowledge for innovation. Both academics and managers have identified crowdsourcing (CS) as one relevant way to do so. CS for innovation involves outsourcing problem-solving or creative tasks to the crowd. To benefit from CS, absorptive capacity (ACAP) is critical; this can be enhanced by prior knowledge and past experience with a partner. However, in the CS context, firms open themselves up to undefined, anonymous partners through the Internet, hence the development of ACAP becomes more difficult. The literature on ACAP describes how internal integration mechanisms encourage the absorption of knowledge but fails to clearly address the way in which uncommon knowledge is integrated. Although literature has acknowledged the beneficial role of a wider spectrum of influential internal and external mechanisms on uncommon knowledge, few empirical studies have addressed the distinctive effect of these mechanisms on the absorption of anonymous partners’ knowledge. To fill this gap, this study identifies relevant integration mechanisms and how they impact upon different ACAP dimensions in the CS context. Five case studies reveal the distinctive influence of integration mechanisms depending on the nature of the CS activity. Our results extend research on ACAP in the little studied digital open context, investigating the absorption of uncommon knowledge from unidentified partners. From a managerial perspective, this study shows that managers need to pay attention to integration mechanisms in order to support the absorption of knowledge from the crowd. More precisely, our study suggests that the main focus should not be on external mechanisms, but also on internal mechanisms. Finally, we open up a new theoretical debate on how these mechanisms should be combined.     

Treating the crowd fairly: Increasing the solvers’ self-selection in idea innovation contests

The success of idea crowdsourcing contests depends on the wideness of the number of solvers that voluntarily self-select to solve the problem broadcast by the seeker and previous research has started to highlight the role of fairness in the self-selection process of solvers. This study aims at deepening the understanding concerning how fairness can influence the solvers’ self-selection. By applying a netnographic research design, we identify possible unexplored facets of fairness in the crowdsourcing context, i.e., prize award, award guaranteed, and non-blind contest. Theoretically, we drew from the organizational justice and fairness literature to develop hypotheses about how the three fairness elements affect solvers’ participation in idea crowdsourcing contests. Then, to empirically test the hypotheses, we performed an econometric analysis building on a distinctive dataset of 1067 contests, broadcast on the 99designs crowdsourcing platform. We found that the three fairness factors which emerged from the netnography have a positive impact on the self-selection of solvers. The results of this study offer important contributions to previous literature and provide several implications for organizations and contest organizers in the idea crowdsourcing context.     

The Value of Crowdsourcing: Can Users Really Compete with Professionals in Generating New Product Ideas?

Generating ideas for new products used to be the exclusive domain of marketers, engineers, and/or designers. Users have only recently been recognized as an alternative source of new product ideas. Whereas some have attributed great potential to outsourcing idea generation to the “crowd” of users (“crowdsourcing”), others have clearly been more skeptical. The authors join this debate by presenting a real‐world comparison of ideas actually generated by a firm's professionals with those generated by users in the course of an idea generation contest. Both professionals and users provided ideas to solve an effective and relevant problem in the consumer goods market for baby products. Executives from the underlying company evaluated all ideas (blind to their source) in terms of key quality dimensions including novelty, customer benefit, and feasibility. The study reveals that the crowdsourcing process generated user ideas that score significantly higher in terms of novelty and customer benefit, and somewhat lower in terms of feasibility. However, the average values for feasibility—in sharp contrast to novelty and customer benefit—tended to be relatively high overall, meaning that feasibility did not constitute a narrow bottleneck in this study. Even more interestingly, it is found that user ideas are placed more frequently than expected among the very best in terms of novelty and customer benefit. These findings, which are quite counterintuitive from the perspective of classic new product development (NPD) literature, suggest that, at least under certain conditions, crowdsourcing might constitute a promising method to gather user ideas that can complement those of a firm's professionals at the idea generation stage in NPD.     

Submission quality in open innovation contests - an analysis of individual-level determinants of idea innovativeness

The digital age allows for integration of dispersed groups into the innovation process. These heterogeneous groups of individuals varying in size and knowledge distribution, also referred to as crowds, build the basis for open innovation contests (OIC), one of the most common forms of crowdsourcing innovation. Different from more focused forms of open innovation, at OIC innovation managers often do not identify or evaluate participants ex-ante. Instead, innovation managers often make use of open calls for participation and assume efficient self-selection of participants i.e., that only motivated and qualified participants will volunteer and engage in the innovation contest. This behavior reflects one of the key assumption of crowdsourcing in participatory innovation settings. However, not every self-selected member is in the position to solve the contest task appropriately. Hence, innovation contests often result in large numbers of submissions, covering a wide range of quality levels, causing decision biases and significant workloads for innovation managers to select ideas. This problem is referred to as “crowding”. In order to reduce “crowding”, open innovation researchers are interested in understanding which types of individuals make the “best” contributions and therefore should be preferably encouraged to participate in in OIC. In this paper, we are assessing what characterizes those participants who submit innovative ideas to OIC, in particular those who submit incremental ideas vs. those who have more radical ideas. Drawing on the componential model of creativity and data generated in innovation contest held by chocolate producer Ritter Sport, we analyze the effect of participants‘ creativity, domain knowledge, and several motivational factors on the innovativeness of their contributions. We find all of these factors to affect the innovativeness of an idea. However, regarding generating incremental or radical innovations, some factors have opposing roles. Our findings imply for practice that innovation managers must decide which type of innovations they intend to generate and then design contests to attract participants with the required characteristics, if they want to increase the number of appropriate ideas and reduce the problems of “crowding”.     

How Firms Develop Capabilities for Crowdsourcing to Increase Open Innovation Performance: The Interplay between Organizational Roles and Knowledge Processes

In recent years, crowdsourcing has emerged as a promising open innovation strategy for firms searching for solutions to technical problems. Previous research has shown that crowdsourcing can provide quick access to distant knowledge at relatively low costs, when compared to other forms of innovation governance such as internal sourcing or contract research. Recent studies, however, indicate that firms differ considerably in their ability to reap the benefits from crowdsourcing. Drawing upon recent work on the microfoundations of capabilities, we hypothesize how three types of lower level organizational elements may affect gains from crowdsourcing: informal organizational roles, formal organizational roles, and knowledge processes. Following a mixed‐method research design and drawing on rich quantitative and qualitative data, we find that informal and formal organizational roles work through processes of knowledge articulation and codification in developing a firm’s crowdsourcing capability. By going beyond the direct effects of the three antecedents, our research sheds light on the process of capability development for open innovation.     

From collaborative community to competitive market: the quest to build a crowdsourcing platform for social innovation

Crowdsourcing presents new opportunities to generate social innovation. However, many crowdsourcing social innovation initiatives struggle with turning their promising projects into sustaining platforms. We studied how to design crowdsourcing platforms for social innovation by building and examining a platform called travel2change. We illustrate a framework of crowdsourcing platform building blocks based on the evolution of our case study from a collaborative community to a competitive market. Thriving platforms have a clear purpose, they facilitate value‐creating interactions for well‐understood actors and build a valid business model. The insights reveal design principles to guide organizations that seek to leverage crowdsourcing for social impact.     

Early supplier integration: the dual role of purchasing in new product development

Interest in early supplier integration in new product development (NPD) has increased as an open innovation approach has become more common in firms. To support supplier integration, the purchasing function of a firm can assume a new ‘dual’ role: contributing to NPD while also managing overall costs. Previous research has offered few insights into how the purchasing function should best be organised so that it will fulfil this dual role. This paper reports on the results of a consortial benchmarking study in which an industry–academic consortium visited and analysed six best‐practice firms. The findings describe how innovative firms organise their purchasing function, distinguishing between ‘advanced sourcing’ and ‘life‐cycle sourcing’ units. The results include the tools that these firms use, such as regular innovation meetings with suppliers and technology roadmaps linking firm strategy, innovation strategy and sourcing strategies. The paper also recommends that researchers shift from a narrow focus on a single project to a broader consideration of supplier and organisational issues in NPD.     

Urban crowdsourcing: Stakeholder selection and dynamic knowledge flows in high and low complexity projects

Urban crowdsourcing is a new form of open innovation that aims to develop smart cities. Due to the heterogeneity of partners in urban planning, knowing the type of knowledge gained from each stakeholder at each stage of the crowdsourcing process needs to be understood for effective collaborations and innovative knowledge flow activation. Using a qualitative approach with experts involved in the Casablanca Smart City project, this research investigates complex multi-stakeholder ecosystems. More specifically, this study identifies and examines the role of external stakeholders at each stage of the innovation process, and the resulting dynamic knowledge flows that help improve the process of urban crowdsourcing in the development of smart city solutions. Depending on the complexity of the innovation project, findings identify three primary stakeholders (citizens, public authorities, and private and public firms) and three secondary stakeholders (NGOs, universities, consulting companies). Results show at which of the four steps of urban crowdsourcing they intervene. Furthermore, the findings reveal a dynamic learning environment composed of two knowledge flows (“learning with” and “learning from” stakeholders).     

Comparing Lead Users to Emergent‐Nature Consumers as Sources of Innovation at Early Stages of New Product Development

The large potential of lead users (LUs) in developing innovative and radically new product concepts is well established in the literature. However, in a widely acknowledged study, Hoffman et al. introduced the new concept of emergent‐nature consumers (ENCs) and showed the superiority of this group of individuals over LUs in developing new product concepts. Consequently, they postulated ENCs to be “the right consumers” to be integrated in new product development processes. In this article, we critically reflect and build on Hoffman et al.'s study and further investigate the promise of the ENC concept as compared to the LU concept. In a pilot study, we replicated the study by Hoffman and colleagues: We conducted a crowdsourcing competition and asked for concepts for new services; those concepts had been generated collectively by the participants and had been assessed by a consumer crowd. In the main study, the participants of a crowdsourcing competition submitted individually generated concepts for products, which were evaluated by industry experts. Across both studies, using different empirical methods in two different contexts, and in contrast to Hoffman et al.'s work, we find support for LUs outperforming ENCs (as well as average users) in generating the commercially most promising concepts. Thus, our insights reinforce the existing user innovation literature and the notion of LUs being the primary source of new product/service concepts.     

Innovating the innovation process: an organisational experiment in global pharma pursuing radical innovation

The challenge of managing the fuzzy front end of the innovation process is particularly acute for large, multi‐brand, research and development (R&D)‐intensive firms. Poor performance at generating radical innovations has resulted in many large organisations seeking to innovate how they organise for innovation. This paper presents an inductive, longitudinal study of an organisational experiment that sought to get ‘game‐changing, radical ideas’ into the new product development funnel of a top three pharma. The immediate outcomes of a team‐based internal innovation tournament included 33 new product ideas, 14 of which were radical. The medium term outcome of the experiment was a reorganisation of how the firm now pursues radical innovation activities. We link these outcomes to team leadership, contrasting innovation processes, including decisions about how to incorporate the ‘voice of the consumer’. The inductive, longitudinal study suggests causal interconnections between innovation team leadership, innovation team processes, and innovation outcomes.     

A network perspective on idea and innovation crowdsourcing in industrial firms

Crowdsourcing has been attracting the attention of both academics and practitioners over recent years. The aim of this article is to contribute to the current body of knowledge on innovation in networked contexts by systematically analyzing various crowdsourcing configurations available to industrial firms. We first develop a categorization of crowdsourcing in industrial firms comprising four distinct configurations: internal crowdsourcing; community crowdsourcing; open crowdsourcing; and crowdsourcing via a broker. We then proceed to draw from the literature on industry networks to further deepen our understanding of how these four distinct configurations can contribute to business and innovation activities of a focal industrial firm. Specifically, we focus on the structural properties, nature of collaboration, and governance of crowdsourcing networks. This novel combination of crowdsourcing and network research delivers new insights that enrich current understanding on various options available to industrial firms operating in networked contexts to facilitate their innovation processes.     

When the Former CEO Stays on Board: The Role of the Predecessor’s Board Retention for Product Innovation in Family Firms

Understanding product innovation in family firms is an important research endeavor given the economic predominance of those firms, their idiosyncrasies, and the importance of constant renewal for those firms to achieve transgenerational survival. Recently, family firm research has highlighted the role of next-generation chief executive officers (CEOs; i.e., successors) who are often seen as drivers for innovating a family firm’s products. However, prior research has typically neglected that predecessors, who are often portrayed as less willing to introduce product innovation, frequently remain involved postsuccession through occupying board positions and thus still substantially influence the decision-making processes and outcomes of family firms, such as product innovation. As a result, our understanding of the role of predecessors and their postsuccession involvement in family firms’ product innovation remains unclear. Building on stakeholder salience theory and on insights from the literature on innovation and succession in family firms, we develop hypotheses about how and under which conditions the predecessor’s board retention affects product innovation in family firms after succession. Building on more than 200 family firm CEO succession cases in small- and medium-sized, privately owned family firms, our results reveal that the predecessor’s board retention negatively affects product innovation. This negative effect is strengthened with increasing involvement of the predecessor in the successor selection process, and it is offset in the case of family succession. Our findings contribute to the emerging stream of research on family firm succession and product innovation and provide important implications for practice.     

Achievements and challenges of innovation co-production support initiatives in the Australian and Dutch dairy sectors: A comparative study

Policymakers and innovation scholars share an increasing interest in how to operationalize innovation support given the increasing number and range of stakeholders engaged in co-producing innovation. Using comparative case study analysis, this article examines support initiatives for dairy sector innovation in The Netherlands and Australia, addressing common challenges such as environmental issues, cattle health, new technology, and human resources. To this end, a review was conducted of documented information and articles published on the initiatives. The qualitative analysis focused on how the co-production process was supported and the achievements and challenges associated with each case. Across both countries and between different initiatives, the main achievements were found to be the generation of very different ideas addressing dairy sector challenges and attempting to bridge public and private sector interests. The main challenges included maintaining effort and momentum for high ambition targets and the potential for duplication as stakeholders became enrolled in different initiatives sponsored by different organizations in an increasingly devolved institutional setting. Furthermore, without strong institutional support for innovation co-production processes, individual actors were less able to operate effectively in innovation co-production roles. It is concluded that dairy sector innovation policies should address institutional constraints (e.g. provision of leadership and rewards for involvement in co-production processes), recognize that facilitation of innovation co-production needs to be adequately resourced, enhance support for initiative coordination to avoid duplication of effort, and take into account the specific institutional setting of countries and sectors to guide the design of innovation co-production support initiatives.     

Structural and relational influences on the role of reward interdependence in product innovation

This study examines the relationship between reward interdependence, or the extent to which managers' rewards are tied to the performance of colleagues in other functions, and product innovation. It also considers how structural and relational features of the organizational context might moderate this relationship. Our analysis of a sample of Canadian‐based firms reveals a positive relationship between reward interdependence and product innovation that is invigorated at higher levels of job rotation, social interaction, and interactional fairness, but we find no evidence of a moderating effect of decision autonomy. Consistent with a systems approach to organizational contingencies, we also find that the reward interdependence–product innovation relationship is stronger when the organization's context comes closer to an ‘ideal’ holistic configuration that is most conducive to knowledge exchange within the organization, with a more prominent role played by the relational sub‐context (social interaction and interactional fairness) than the structural sub‐context (job rotation and decision autonomy). The findings have important implications for innovation research as they shed light on how the extent to which individual rewards are tied to collective performance can be channeled to enhance innovation pursuits.     

The framing of innovation among European research funding actors: Assessing the potential for ‘responsible research and innovation’ in the food and health domain

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has recently emerged as a new framework for science and technology governance. The concept articulates the need for mutual exchange by which societal actors become responsive to each other early on in the process of innovation, with a view to facilitate ethically acceptable and sustainable innovation. There is relatively limited evidence to explore the extent to which the process of research and innovation under the terms of RRI is realised in practice, particularly in the context of food and health research. Although research to date has been examining innovation from the point of view of inputs and outputs—R&D funding and patents—we propose to examine the cognitive framing of innovation that shapes decisions of those who constitute a part of the innovation chain. This paper explores how the concept of innovation is understood and used in policy implementation, with a particular focus upon ‘food and health’ science and research policy and funding. Our analysis is based on 55 interviews of various actors engaged in research funding decision-making across eight European countries. Three themes emerged from the analysis: concept of innovation; conditions for innovation; and drivers of innovation; through these themes, the cognitive framing was drawn out. The cognitive framing suggests that innovation in the food and health domain is perceived to be focused on biosciences and marketable applications to the neglect of social sciences and broader public interest; that the “innovation network” is primarily viewed as centred around scientific/technical and industrial actors; and that the demand-pull dynamic is relevant to innovation in the area of food and health, despite having been relegated in contemporary thinking and policies around innovation. These findings point to the inadequate consideration of the normative issues—how problems are to be defined and addressed—among national research funders in the food and health domain, and indicate a gap between the ideas of innovation under the terms of RRI and innovation as conceptualised by those involved in its governance.     

A critical look at technological innovation typology and innovativeness terminology: a literature review

A plethora of definitions for innovation types has resulted in an ambiguity in the way the terms ‘innovation’ and ‘innovativeness’ are operationalized and utilized in the new product development literature. The terms radical, really‐new, incremental and discontinuous are used ubiquitously to identify innovations. One must question, what is the difference between these different classifications? To date consistent definitions for these innovation types have not emerged from the new product research community. A review of the literature from the marketing, engineering, and new product development disciplines attempts to put some clarity and continuity to the use of these terms. This review shows that it is important to consider both a marketing and technological perspective as well as a macrolevel and microlevel perspective when identifying innovations. Additionally, it is shown when strict classifications from the extant literature are applied, a significant shortfall appears in empirical work directed toward radical and really new innovations. A method for classifying innovations is suggested so that practitioners and academics can talk with a common understanding of how a specific innovation type is identified and how the innovation process may be unique for that particular innovation type. A recommended list of measures based on extant literature is provided for future empirical research concerning technological innovations and innovativeness.

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How to leverage the impact of R&D on product innovation? The moderating effect of management innovation

Although research and development (R&D) is a key indicator of (technological) innovation, scholars have found mixed results regarding its effect on product innovation and firm performance. In this paper, we claim that variations in R&D effectiveness can be explained by changes in a firm’s social system, in particular in its management innovation. It is still unclear how management innovation influences R&D effectiveness in terms of product innovation. In this study, we address this theoretical and empirical gap in the innovation literature. Our theoretical arguments and findings from a large-scale survey among Dutch firms show that R&D has a decreasingly positive relationship with product innovation, particularly for firms with low levels of management innovation. However, in firms with high levels of management innovation, this relationship becomes more J-shaped, especially in small and medium-sized firms. Our findings also appear to indicate that management innovation may be more important for competitive advantage than just R&D. Overall, our insights reveal that management innovation is a key moderator in explaining firms’ effectiveness in transforming R&D into successful product innovation.     

Managing the challenges of business-to-business open innovation in complex projects: A multi-stage process model

Research shows that knowledge sharing and system integration are two major challenges posed by openness to business partners in complex innovation projects. However, there remains limited research on the microfoundations (i.e., actions and practices) underpinning the organizational capabilities required to address these challenges. Drawing on a case study of a pioneering electric vehicle manufacturer, we develop a multi-stage process model showing how these capabilities are developed and phased out in terms of the organizational principles (e.g., hierarchical product architecture) and actions and practices (e.g., sharing knowledge by deputing staff to/from business partners). Our study contributes to the literature by taking a microfoundations approach to unpack the ‘black box’ of organizational capabilities critical for managing complex innovation projects into actions and practices, and emphasizes the importance of firms' internal preparedness for managing openness.