Public crowdsourcing and co-production processes: A case study on European innovation contests
Isabelle Liotard, Valérie Revest · Revue d économie industrielle · 2023
While many studies in economics and management have examined the phenomenon of crowdsourcing in the private sector, research on public crowdsourcing is limited. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring how public actors mobilize crowdsourcing to create innovation policies. Our work is part of a wider effort to renew innovation policies, embedded in the Transformative Innovation Policy approach, of which co-production between different stakeholders is a key component. In line with this view, we draw on a specific tool: public innovation contests. Through the study of twenty-two contests launched by the European Commission between 2015 and 2020, and on the basis of interviews conducted with contest managers, we characterize the type of public crowdsourcing mobilized. The findings show that European innovation contests are based on a combination of competitive and collaborative crowdsourcing and that each type of crowdsourcing involves a specific audience. While we observe a form of co-production with stakeholders, this remains limited to the design and evaluation stages of the contests. The renewal of innovation policies through the mobilization of new tools such as contests and crowdsourcing highlights the importance of digital tools for public actors wanting to involve stakeholders in the design and implementation of future innovations.JEL classification: O33, O35, L38.