The Decision to Participate or not to Participate in Open Innovation Contests

Abstract

One key issue in the literature on open innovation contests is the question why individuals volunteer to participate in crowdsourced innovation. Different from previous studies, we do not restrict our analysis to motivational factors, but by building upon Amabile’s componential theory of creativity (CTC) comprehensively investigate on the influence of a wider set of factors. We further extend the CTC by including self-perceived creativity as an additional factor. To test our hypotheses, we use a unique data set including information on both, participants and non-participants collected in an online innovation contest held by the car manufacturer Porsche. As hypothesized, we find higher levels of creativity-relevant processes, domain-specific skills, and task motivation to increase the likelihood of participation. Furthermore, we find no direct effect, but expected and counterintuitive moderating effects of self-perceived creativity.