The Opportunists in Innovation Contests

Overview:

Organizations increasingly turn to innovation contests for solutions to their complex problems. But these contests still face a fundamental inefficiency: they need to attract many participants to find the right solution, resulting in high costs and uncertainty. Studies have identified multiple dichotomies of successful and unsuccessful solver types, but these diverge. These studies also offer little guidance on how to attract successful solver types. We introduce the opportunist-transactor dichotomy, bridging whom to attract and how to attract them. Opportunists view the contest as a onramp to a new pursuit instead of a temporary undertaking. Characterizing solvers according to this new dichotomy was a better predictor of success than existing ones: in our context, most winners were opportunists. This type of solver was also reliably attracted by the seeker’s in-kind incentives, unlike those described by the other dichotomies. Our insights provide a deeper understanding of participants in complex contests and a concrete lever for influencing who shows up to solve.

Keywords::

• Innovation contest
• Crowdsourcing
• Open innovation
• NASA
• In-kind incentives

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ademir Vrolijk

Ademir Vrolijk is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. He studies engineering design in real-world settings and explores how technical organizations can leverage collaborative approaches, like crowdsourcing, to design better systems. He received a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Carleton University and a PhD in systems engineering from The George Washington University’s Engineering Management and Systems Engineering department. He was also a Visiting Researcher at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) at Harvard University. Outside of academia, he has worked as a project management professional in the defense and medical technology industries. He also sat on the national board of the Canadian Space Society. [email protected]

Zoe Szajnfarber

Zoe Szajnfarber is a professor and chair of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at The George Washington University. Her research focuses on the design and development of complex systems—primarily in the aerospace and defense sectors—considering both the organization and technical system architectures to “design-in” an ability to achieve performance goals across extended and highly uncertain operational lifetimes. Recent projects examine the nature and function of scientific and technical expertise in the design process, particularly in the context of open innovation. She has a bachelor’s degree in engineering science from the University of Toronto, dual master’s degrees in aeronautics and astronautics and technology policy, and a PhD in engineering systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has worked as a systems engineer and researcher at both space contractors and government agencies in Canada, Europe, and the United States. [email protected]