Exploring the impact of motivations on the attraction of innovation roles in open innovation web-based platforms

Abstract

Recently, a large number of new innovative enterprises engaged in different competitive markets by promoting innovation both in products and in services through open innovation web-based platforms, which allow for the collaboration of individual users and companies and for so-called crowdsourcing. A key issue concerns the identification of the most important motivations that could attract users with a specific role to proactively participate and contribute to the open and collaborative innovation processes. This article, after highlighting the theoretical background, grounded on large body of psychology and sociology literature on the motivation behind collaboration, discusses the results of the analysis of 26 open innovation web-based platforms based on a multiple research methodology (qualitative empirical study, factor analysis and multi-dimensional scaling). It also discusses the effects of ‘motivational systems’ and platform models on the attraction of the individuals characterised by different innovation roles.

Keywords:

• motivations
• innovation roles
• open innovation web-based platforms

Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme managed by REA-Research Executive Agency http://ec.europa.eu/research/rea ([FP 7 – SME 2008 – 2]) under grant agreement no. [243593], project COLLECTIVE – Emerging communities for collective innovation: ICT Operational tool and supporting methodologies for SME Associations. For details, see www.collective-project.eu.

Notes

Note

1. The woorank indicator is a free website analysis tool (http://www.woorank.com/) that classifies websites based on a different set of indicators for both internal analysis of the website (e.g. structure of the site) and external analysis (e.g. popularity).