Walking parallel paths or walking the same road? Collaborative incentives in innovation contests
Viktoria Boss, Robin Kleer, Alexander Vossen · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2014
Within this paper, we examine the role of collaborative incentives in innovation contests. Using two 2x2 between subject laboratory experiments, we analyze how a competitive/collaborative setting, as well as impact/non-impact condition influences ideation activity and elaboration effort. Contrary to the dominant view in innovation management literature, which assumes that innovation contest ought to be competitive, we suggest that for ideation contests a different setting may be appropriate. With our experiments, we show that indeed a collaborative approach can be useful for ideation projects; however, two assumptions need to be fulfilled. First, overall effort must be compensated and participants need to be aware of the impact of their actions. Second, it needs to be apparent for participants what idea(s) to focus on. These results imply that a company wanting to switch to a collaborative incentive mechanism has to give feedback throughout the ideation contest (and not only at the end with a single prize) in order to better steer participants’ behavior and show them how their actions influenced their outcome.