Innovation contests represent one way for companies to engage the crowd in order to spur innovation (Morgan & Wang, 2010). Such contests have proven to be a successful way of fostering new idea creations, product developments and innovations (Bullinger, Neyer, Rass, & Moeslein, 2010). Innovation contests however are only as good as the involved participants. Thus, for contest organizers it is a crucial task to activate people to take part and continuously motivate participants (Scheiner, 2015).
Participants of such contests are heterogeneous, possess distinct motives and behave differently (David & Shapiro, 2008). For organizers, which have no influence on the internal motives of participants, it is essential to foster motivation by providing the right mix of incentives (Leimeister, Huber, Bretschneider, & Krcmar, 2009).
Especially the adjustment of prize or reward structure towards the participants’ incentive expectation and subsequently the motivation of participants is of considerable interest in research (Connelly, Tihanyi, Crook, & Gangloff, 2014; Fullerton & McAfee, 1999; Taylor, 1995). Rewards can function as incentive for participants in innovation contests. They are extrinsic motivators often in form of offered cash prizes (Leimeister et al., 2009) but also trigger hedonic motives (Walcher, 2007).
To incentivize participants also gamification elements are applied to online communities (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011) as well as to idea contests (Scheiner & Witt, 2013) and crowdsourcing initiatives (Morschheuser, Hamari, & Koivisto, 2016). The term gamification is used, if game elements are implemented in non-game contexts to drive playfulness (Deterding et al., 2011), increase motivation (Lee et al., 2013; Scheiner & Witt, 2013) and encourage user participation and engagement (Anderson, Huttenlocher, Kleinberg, & Leskovec, 2013; Denny, 2013).
In this research we introduce a new form of incentive – the interim reward. This reward comprises a monetary prize, but also can be considered as interim performance feedback by the contest organizer and as game element, because the awarded ideas are tagged with visual badges. The contest organizer assigns the interim reward to the first high quality idea submissions. These ideas are selected based on publicly communicated criteria. The reward possesses a two folded structure. Firstly, the reward as a monetary prize might have the potential to yield motivation of the participants in the sense of monetary compensation and hedonic factors of rewards. Secondly the visual depiction of the winning ideas in form of a placed badge might enclose the motivational factors deduced from gamification theory.
In our research we explore if and how this interim reward influences the motivation and behavior of participants during the contest. In this manner we contribute to the understanding of how incentive structures influence participation behavior and trigger motivation. To conduct this research we use log-file data from four different innovation contests. The observed contests are similar in difficulty and context of the task. Furthermore, two of those contests provide interim rewards for high quality ideas and final rewards for winning ideas, whereas two contests only provide final rewards for winning ideas. By analyzing these four contests we are able to investigate on differences of participation behavior within contests using interim rewards, within those who do not use such awards, and between these two innovation contest types. Following this approach we expect to locate the effects of the interim reward.
The study observes a contest perspective and individual user perspective. As methods we apply social network analysis to retrieve communication and centrality measures. In addition we include measures such as number of ideas submitted, likes received, evaluations given and evaluations received for ideas.
As a first step we examined an engineering contest that provides an interim reward. Results show that winners of the interim reward hold a central role in the network of the community and have higher interaction values than other participants, measured with in-degree and out-degree centrality as well as betweeness. Compared along the contest measures the interim rewarded participants possess a higher value of submitted ideas, received likes and evaluations on their ideas than other users. But they didn’t provide more evaluations. Nonetheless, the task description of the contest was rather challenging, hence the contest dynamics were limited to ten percent of the whole community, from which twenty percent were interim reward winners. This raises the discussion if this findings are related to the interim reward or just to the fact that the interim reward winners are in general the most motivated users in the innovation contest community.
Looking at descriptive statistics on contest level, we couldn’t find any plateau, rise or fall before or after the announcement of the last interim reward. Only the number of evaluations received before and after are of difference, especially the experts started to evaluate more ideas after the last interim reward was announced. Nevertheless this could be due to internal communication of the contest organizer to rise the number of expert evaluations. The number of user evaluations remained the same before and after. Being an interim rewarded participant has a positive influence on the expert evaluation of the ideas. This could indicate that experts are more familiar with interim reward winners and sympathize with these users. On the other hand the interim reward is selected and announced by these experts, making this finding discussable.
Aside from previously mentioned analyses, in future research we examine the registration date of users and are interested if the interim reward has the power to recruit users more quickly. We are curious to investigate, if the interim rewards lead to a higher degree of idea development and quality in the beginning of the contest.
The newly introduced design element could have the potential to influence the participation behavior and could arguably provide contest organizers with a tool to affect participant motivation.
Until August we will finalize the comparison of the four innovation contests along the previously introduced measures to retrieve insights about the impact of interim rewards on user participation behavior.
Interim_Rewards_in_Innovation_Contests_FUELLER_SCHIMPF_FUGER.pdf 