Year: 2012
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The goal of this dissertation is to better understand how to manage IT-based innovation contests by taking into account challenges associated with the attraction and facilitation of participants. Attraction aims for drawing on people to the innovation contest so that they join the competition and later on hand in capable solutions. Facilitation strives for supporting participants during the course of the innovation contest so that they feel comfortable with the contest and come up with qualitative solutions as well. In total, this dissertation provides a systematic state-of-the-art report about research in the field of innovation contests and suggests empirically derived approaches for the attraction and facilitation of participants in IT-based innovation contests. By reading this dissertation, the reader will find the following information. From a systematic literature review on innovation contests, five categories to separate literature are derived and, in addition, some characteristic design elements of innovation contests are provided. In conclusion, the literature review identifies the two challenging activities for managing innovation contests – namely the attraction and facilitation of participants. It is demonstrated how the approach of action research is used to understand and master challenges of attraction and facilitation. Based on three action research cases representing three real-world innovation contests, four action research studies are arranged. These answer the following four research questions of this dissertation: How to attract participants to innovation contests? What type of participants to attract? How to facilitate participants in innovation contests? How to arrange facilitation? Regarding attraction, a two-step strategy for drawing on participants is provided and the attraction of heterogeneous participants with diverse backgrounds is suggested. With respect to facilitation, recommendations regarding social and intellectual peer facilitation as well as their combination are given. In order to handle facilitation in an innovation contest, four crucial facilitation activities are identified and a framework for joint facilitation through peer and professional facilitators is deduced. Based on this, a two-step facilitation strategy is suggested. Finally, all findings of this dissertation are summarized and reflected and implications for management practice as well as future research are provided.
Author: Sabrina Adamczyk
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Science Applications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3136641602