Open Innovation Contests in Online Markets: Idea Generation and Idea Evaluation with Collective Intelligence

Аннотация

To overcome constrained resources, firms can actively seek innovative opportunities from the external world. This innovation approach, called open innovation (Chesbrough 2003; Hippel 2005; Terwiesch and Ulrich 2009; Terwiesch and Xu 2008), is receiving more and more attention. Facilitated by the global Internet and emerging forms of information technology, it has become very easy for companies to generate large numbers of innovative solutions through the use of online open innovation contests or crowdsourcing contests (Archak and Sundararajan 2009; Terwiesch and Ulrich 2009; Terwiesch and Xu 2008; Yang et al. 2009). For an innovation project to succeed, it is necessary to generate not only a large number of good ideas or solutions, but also to identify those that are “exceptional” (Terwiesch and Ulrich 2009). This dissertation contains three studies that aim to improve our understanding of how best to use contests as a tool to aggregate external resources (collective intelligence) in the generation and evaluation of solutions.