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Friday 23 December 2011

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

Authors
Ivo Blohm1, Ulrich Bretschneider2, Jan Marco Leimeister3, Helmut Krcmar4

1Chair for Information Systems (I17), Technische Universitat Munchen, Boltzmann Str. 3, 85748 Garching b. Munchen, Germany.
2Chair for Information Systems (I17), Technische Universitat Munchen, Boltzmann Str. 3, 85748 Garching b. Munchen, Germany.
3Chair for Information Systems (I17), Universitat Kassel, Nora-Platiel-Strasse 4, 34127 Kassel, Germany.
4Chair for Information Systems (I17), Technische Universitat Munchen, Boltzmann Str. 3, 85748 Garching b. Munchen, Germany

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

Inderscience - Journal Article

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