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Firms increasingly integrate a wide range of actors in the early ideation and concept creation phases of innovation processes leading to the collection of a large number of ideas. This creates the challenge of filtering the most promising ideas from a large number of submissions. The use of external stakeholders into the evaluation and selection of submissions (i.e. open evaluation (OE)) might be a viable alternative. The purpose of this paper is to provide a state-of-the-art analysis on how such OE systems are designed and structured.

Since OE is a new phenomenon, an exploratory qualitative research approach is adopted. In all, 122 instances of OE in 90 innovation contest cases are examined for their design elements.

This research reveals that OE systems are configured in many different ways. In total, 32 design elements and their respective parameters are identified and described along the six socio-technical system components of an OE system. This study allows for a comprehensive understanding of what OE is and what factors need to be taken into consideration when designing an OE system.

Scholars and professionals may draw insights on what design choices to make when implementing OE.

The comprehensive analysis performed in this study contributes to research on open and user innovation by examining the concept of OE. In particular, it extends knowledge on design elements of OE systems.

This study aims to demonstrate how destination management organizations can fruitfully harvest users’ ideas by facilitating an online idea contest to enhance value creation and innovation processes. The structure of the idea quality, contest-related factors and user-related factors are investigated in relation to the overall quality of the ideas submitted by users.

A total of 489 ideas were assessed based on the overall quality and effects of various factors. A structural model was tested to analyze the dimensions contributing to quality of the submissions that influence the overall idea quality. Furthermore, non-parametric tests were performed to reveal how specific user traits as well as contest-related traits relate to overall idea quality. Lastly, post-hoc analyses were performed to reveal if mean values differ among users who are grouped according to age, overall idea quality, place of residence and age at time of submission.

The study demonstrates that novelty, feasibility, relevance and elaboration explain overall idea quality. Only the age of the idea submitter exhibits an impact on the level of idea quality, wherein younger users tend to submit higher quality ideas. The areas of innovation significantly differ depending on the users’ place of residence and age. Moreover, none of the contest-related traits that were analyzed have an impact on the level of overall idea quality.

Marketing managers and destination management organizations are given a set of recommendations on how to facilitate internet-based participation tools, such as idea contests, to collect high-quality input from various user segments and, subsequently, to feed their value creation and innovation processes.

Within the field of tourism, the open tourism paradigm is relatively new. New insights into the role of online tools, and how they can be leveraged to harvest users’ ideas, as well as users’ capabilities for enhancing tourism firms’ value creation and innovation processes, are provided.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevant factors that influence the implementation of innovation contests, an open innovation (OI) practice that has been extensively reported in the literature as a managerial tool for external knowledge search. The authors focus the study on the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The approach is a retrospective case study. This methodology allows an in-depth view into a Spanish SME that successfully undertook two new product development processes thanks to the deployment of innovation contests.

The main context factors influencing innovation contests as managerial tool are ambidexterity, technological and marketing turbulence and intermediaries, among others. Regarding design factors, this work highlights the role of attraction and facilitation. Additionally, the repetitive implementation of innovation contests creates a corporate culture that promotes OI activities.

Managers will understand that they can use innovation contests as a managerial tool, and knowing the factors that need to be taken into account when implementing an innovation contest will help SMEs managers to make better use of this practice.

This case study enriches the literature of both innovation contests and topics relevant to SMEs. Based on a theoretical framework of the design factors that influence the implementation of innovation contests, the authors propose a research framework that incorporates those context factors in association with an SME.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the different heuristics adopted by a crowd and a management committee to evaluate new product proposals, and whether, in assessing the value of proposals, they emphasize different features.

The study takes a quantitative analysis approach to study an internal innovation contest held by the biotechnology company Novozymes. The contest generated 201 proposals that were evaluated by 109 research and development professionals by means of a virtual preference market, and by a management committee.

The crowd and the committees’ assessments of the value of the proposals were based on different features. The committee emphasized experience and inventors’ seniority; the crowd set more store on informative idea descriptions but penalized overly complex and lengthy proposals.

The design of the innovation contest does not allow full comparison of the preference functions of crowd and committee. The findings from this case study cannot be generalized. The early stage of new product development seems fruitful for investigating crowdsourcing and knowledge management.

Firms should consider adopting preference markets for idea screening and evaluation since they appraise ideas from different angles compared to managers. However, they complement, rather than substitute managerial evaluation, especially in the case of more detailed proposals.

This is one of the first attempts to identify differences in the decision-making processes of crowds and committees. The paper identifies their strengths as evaluators of new product ideas and finds that the “wisdom of crowds” has some limitations in relation to the ability to process complex information.

The purpose of this paper is to explore consequences of the use of social media for idea generation.

The paper analyzes over 600 ideas submitted to a Slate‐Twitter contest to find the best short characterization of the American Declaration of Independence. These findings are then compared with those of Kornish and Ulrich, who analyzed idea‐contests in classroom settings.

In the Slate‐Twitter contest, repetition of ideas was rare while recombination was frequent. The evolution in the total number of unique ideas suggests that the contest became more focused over time. It also appears that ideas that are recognized as valuable attract similar ideas in turn.

Further checks will be needed with regard to the robustness of the findings. Furthermore, while the current analysis relies on peer review by participants to the contest to value submissions, results might be different if it were done on the basis of independent external reviews. Conceptually, the findings suggest that idea generation via social media has a more iterative character than previously analyzed forms of broadcast search. Future research could investigate what triggers more exploration and exploitation of ideas in this process.

For businesses, which are more and more encouraged to engage in open innovation, the analysis can serve as guide on the use of social media for information collection.

The paper provides a simple and effective method to monitor social media, which firms can use to their advantage.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.

Companies are discovering the power of crowdsourcing as a source of new ideas for products and services. It is assumed that the personal engagement and the continuous involvement with a company’s products or services over a period of several weeks positively affect participants’ loyalty intentions toward the host companies. The research leads the authors to challenge this assumption. In addition to mere participation in crowdsourcing initiatives, the authors argue that perceptions of fairness will explain changes in customer relationship-related consequences such as loyalty, perceived innovativeness and product interest. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors analyzed a real-life crowdsourcing contest launched by a leading lighting manufacturer and investigated the impact of two fairness dimensions (distributive and procedural) on participants’ future behavioral and attitudinal intentions (n=121). The analysis was performed with SEM.

The results suggest that fairness perceptions are significantly related to evoked product interest, perceived innovativeness and loyalty intentions. The analysis reveals that the influence of the fairness dimensions is asymmetric: while distributive fairness can be considered as a basic factor that must be fulfilled in order to avoid negative behavioral consequences, procedural fairness instead is an excitement factor that causes truly positive behavioral consequences.

The results are particularly relevant for companies launching a crowdsourcing competition under their own brand name, and for broadcasting platforms. For companies with no relations to end-users, these findings may not be as relevant.

Organizers of crowdsourcing contests should be aware that such initiatives can be a double-edged sword. Fair Play is a must to gain the positive effects from crowdsourcing initiatives for both new product development and the customer relationship. For companies lacking the capabilities to manage crowdsourcing initiatives professionally it is advisable to rely on intermediary broadcasting platforms.

The research is the first to investigate systematically the consequences of fairness perceptions in a real-life crowdsourcing idea contest. The authors demonstrate the asymmetric nature of fairness perceptions on three different outcome variables that are important for the customer relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how an adequate mix of technological, organisational and managerial tools might support Open Innovation (OI) processes achieved by contests in the food sector.

The methodology of this paper is exploratory in nature. Data have been gathered about the 140 innovation contests launched by the best global food brands (2013 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands) over the last decade.

The research highlights the main changes that have occurred over the last decade, showing that the choice of platform type for contest launches is often neglected or considered as an ancillary element. Indeed, it is a choice that embeds another set of technological, organisational and managerial tools that strongly influence the collaborative behaviour (and the participation itself) of partners throughout the innovation process.

Companies investigated in this paper consist exclusively of top brands in the sector. Future research should strive to obtain larger samples, develop a set of fine-grained hypotheses, and test them by using appropriate statistical techniques.

This paper fills an inexplicable gap in academic literature due to the fact that food companies are those that mainly use contests in order to implement OI but they are scarcely researched regarding this issue.

The research study intends to gain a better understanding of members' behaviors in the context of crowdsourcing contests. The authors examined the key factors that can motivate or discourage contributing to a team and within the community.

The authors conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with Kaggle.com members and analyzed the data to capture individual members' contributions and emerging determinants that play a role during this process. The authors adopted a qualitative approach and used standard thematic coding techniques to analyze the data.

The analysis revealed two processes underlying contribution to the team and community and the decision-making involved in each. Accordingly, a set of key factors affecting each process were identified. Using Holbrook's (2006) typology of value creation, these factors were classified into four types, namely extrinsic and self-oriented (economic value), extrinsic and other-oriented (social value), intrinsic and self-oriented (hedonic value), and intrinsic and other-oriented (altruistic value). Three propositions were developed, which can be tested in future research.

The study has a few limitations, which point to areas for future research on this topic. First, the authors only assessed the behaviors of individuals who use the Kaggle platform. Second, the findings of this study may not be generalizable to other crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, where there is no competition, and participants cannot meaningfully contribute to the community. Third, the authors collected data from a limited (yet knowledgeable) number of interviewees. It would be useful to use bigger sample sizes to assess other possible factors that did not emerge from our analysis. Finally, the authors presented a set of propositions for individuals' contributory behavior in crowdsourcing contest platforms but did not empirically test them. Future research is necessary to validate these hypotheses, for instance, by using quantitative methods (e.g. surveys or experiments).

The authors offer recommendations for implementing appropriate mechanisms for contribution to crowdsourcing contests and platforms. Practitioners should design architectures to minimize the effect of factors that reduce the likelihood of contributions and maximize the factors that increase contribution in order to manage the tension of simultaneously encouraging contribution and competition.

The research study makes key theoretical contributions to research. First, the results of this study help explain the individuals' contributory behavior in crowdsourcing contests from two aspects: joining and selecting a team and content contribution to the community. Second, the findings of this study suggest a revised and extended model of value co-creation, one that integrates this study’s findings with those of Nov et al. (2009), Lakhani and Wolf (2005), Wasko and Faraj (2000), Chen et al. (2018), Hahn et al. (2008), Dholakia et al. (2004) and Teichmann et al. (2015). Third, using direct accounts collected through first-hand interviews with crowdsourcing contest members, this study provides an in-depth understanding of individuals' contributory behavior. Methodologically, this authors’ approach was distinct from common approaches used in this research domain that used secondary datasets (e.g. the content of forum discussions, survey data) (e.g. see Lakhani and Wolf, 2005; Nov et al., 2009) and quantitative techniques for analyzing collaboration and contribution behavior.

The authors advance the broad field of crowdsourcing by extending the literature on value creation in the online community, particularly as it relates to the individual participants. The study advances the theoretical understanding of contribution in crowdsourcing contests by focusing on the members' point of view, which reveals both the determinants and the process for joining teams during crowdsourcing contests as well as the determinants of contribution to the content distributed in the community.

Fostering employee engagement in large organizations is a formidable problem that gets even more challenging in a sluggish economy, when the standard lever of monetary incentives are not a viable option for boosting employee engagement and motivation. As the organization gets larger, building emotional connectedness or bonding becomes challenging as teams expand to operate in different time zones. The overwhelming pace of work in the modern workplace can also hamper bonding. Yet emotional connectedness, when present, serves as a catalyst in driving superior performance and employee loyalty. The culture of many large organizations discourages innovation and out-of-the-box thinking because their institutional structures encourage risk aversion. Even though large organizations are best positioned to absorb the ups and downs of intelligent risk-taking, their talent processes enforce conformity, legitimize mediocrity and penalize failed attempts at innovative thinking. Performance appraisals tend to promote employees who take the path of least resistance. Managers, of course, help perpetuate this risk-averse cycle of mediocrity. Either they have been conditioned to think only in a linear fashion or organizational systems perpetuate managerial insecurity at all levels. This insecurity manifests in several ways: managers may take credit for the work performed by a subordinate; shoot down ideas a subordinate may have; or deflect opportunities that a subordinate may get. Survival in such an environment is based on being average and staying within the system. As a result, the spirit of entrepreneurship is lost. The authors designed a creative and playful contest called “Maverick” to tackle employee engagement in large organizations. The contest deeper goals include: shifting culture and behavior, talent discovery, brand building and meaningful engagement. The impact of the program on a broader organizational culture parameters were assessed through a survey. The survey results validate the impact of the program.

The paper develops a conceptual approach that underlies the design of the Maverick program. Surveys were deployed to determine the perceived impact of the program on the broader culture.

The secret ingredient in employee engagement is gaining the “emotional share of wallet” of employees to drive meaningful, enduring organizational change. Emotional wallet share is the sweet spot that lies at the intersection of employees’ skill sets, their aspirations and the value they generate for the organization. Proactively identifying the sweet spot empowers an organization to capture employees’ emotional wallet share to identify enablers and catalysts that can unlock motivation and performance. The survey results indicate that the Maverick contest was perceived to have a positive impact on all the identified attributes. This is a testament to the program’s success as a pivotal driver of a positive organizational culture. Further, it validates that the Maverick contest identifies several levers that leaders can use to positively influence organizational culture.

The organizations can adapt the proposed conceptual framework in designing meaningful programs to tackle employee engagement and motivation.

The paper provides a meaningful framework to tackle employee engagement in large organizations. The Maverick approach is of interest to leaders of large organizations that are struggling to increase employee engagement with limited resources and that wish to foster creativity to drive innovation. The program offers a compelling way for talented professionals to meaningfully contribute to their organization that is agnostic to their position in the hierarchy. It gives employees the freedom to strive without being paralyzed by fear of failure; the chance to build their personal brand and pride; and a safe environment in which they can question received wisdom and attempt an unconventional approach to problem-solving. It creates a playful environment to bust stress, foster innovation and encourage an entrepreneurial mindset.

This paper offers a superior alternative to the standard gamification solutions that are routinely applied to business situations. Gamification mechanics work effectively in roles that are transactional, instead of roles that demand autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose. Maverick program is designed while being mindful of the intrinsic motivation of the professionals.