Public Crowdsourcing and Co-production Processes : a Case Study on European Innovation Contests

While many studies in economics and management have examined the phenomenon of crowdsourcing in the private sector, research on public crowdsourcing is scant. This article aims to fill this gap by exploring how public actors mobilise crowdsourcing to set innovation policies. Our work is part of a wider effort to renew innovation policies, embedded in the Transformative Innovation Policy's approach, in which co-production between different stakeholders is a key component. In line with this view, we rely on a specific tool: public innovation contests. Through the study of 22 contests launched by the European Commission between 2015 and 2020, and on the basis of interviews conducted with contest managers, we characterise the type of public crowdsourcing mobilised. The findings show that European innovation contests are based on a combination of competitive and collaborative crowdsourcing and that each type of crowdsourcing involves a specific audience. Although we observe co-production with stakeholders, it remains limited to contests' stages of design and evaluation. The renewal of innovation policies through the mobilisation of new tools such as contests and crowdsourcing highlights the importance of digital tools for public actors wanting to involve stakeholders in the design and implementation of future innovations.