Rethinking the Design of Innovation Crowdsourcing Competitions: Strategies for Shaping Participation Structure and Maximizing Value Creation

Crowdsourcing through virtual innovation contests have emerged as a prominent option for addressing creative and complex R&D problems. This approach is flexible, encourages voluntary participation, and combines competition and collaboration. Organizations that turn to innovation crowdsourcing (ICS) are looking for transformative solutions, not incremental improvements. However, little is known about how to shape teams and optimize their capacity to create value in CS competitions. To address this knowledge gap, our study delves into analyzing how contest design influences participation structure and project value creation. Our approach extends the conclusions of previous research that emphasized the importance of motivation and active engagement as fundamental factors for effective problem-solving. Our research goes further by examining the role played by other dimensions of participation structure, such as team size, as well as solvers' social and intellectual capital.