Antecedent dimensions in the brazilian public administration: an analysis of the innovation contest in the public sector

The analysis of innovation contests and/or awards represents a promotion to the production of this topic in public administration. This research aimed at mapping the main antecedent innovation dimensions which are present in the initiatives awarded by the Innovation Contest in Public Administration. This is a qualitative and descriptive work based on documental research whose data characterization/classification was done according to the model by De Vries, Beckkers and Tummers (2016). A theme analysis was used with the support of the QSR NVivo® software. The results pointed that, from 2008 to 2016, innovation in the initiatives awarded happened predominantly in the federal domain and it is the process-type. The main dimensions that contributed to innovation in the public administration were: Social Participation (Environmental antecedent); Client/beneficiary and market knowledge, Strategic information management/Standardization of data and processes, Strategic planning and Transforming leadership/Managers’ pro-innovation attitudes (Organizational antecedents); Strategic intention to innovate and Project management (Innovation Characteristics antecedents); and Commitment (Individual antecedents). The managerial contribution of this research lies on the identification of the main antecedent dimensions, such as the good practices that contribute to innovation in the public administration, since they can control plans, programs and innovation policies, especially on subnational levels. The dimensions that were mapped could also favor the development of an innovation culture that has society satisfaction with public services as a result.

PAYING FOR LEGITIMACY? THE SIGNALLING EFFECT OF MONETARY REWARDS IN INNOVATION CONTESTS

Monetary rewards have become widely used to compensate user engagement in innovation contests. Building on literature on social judgement of organisations, we provide evidence on another important effect of monetary rewards in innovation contests, namely a signalling effect that may either enhance or lower a contest host’s legitimacy and subsequently users’ willingness to participate in the contest. Along three studies, we show that the signalling effect is especially beneficial for the innovation contest purposes that are incongruent with the host’s organisational stereotype, i.e., in cases where she lacks specific organisational traits that constitute users’ perception of organisational legitimacy. Offering a higher monetary reward in such a scenario allows hosts to overcome a lack of legitimacy and consequently foster user participation.

Beyond Related Experience: Upstream vs. Downstream Experience in Innovation Contest Platforms with Interdependent Problem Domains

Problem definition: Innovation contest platforms are often organized around specific fields and host contests that span a variety of interdependent problem domains. Whereas contestants may benefit from related experience in contests whose problem domains share an interdependency with the focal problem domain, it is unclear whether the benefits of related experience arise symmetrically from upstream experience (i.e., experience in problem domains that provide input information to the focal problem domain) and downstream experience (i.e., experience in problem domains that use output information from the focal problem domain) or differ among them. Academic/practical relevance: Given that innovation contest platforms serve to effectively match contest problem requirements with contestants’ skills, it is important to understand how a contestant’s prior experience on a platform contributes to her problem-solving performance. Our research provides a more granular examination of the benefits of related experience than what has been examined in prior studies on individual learning or innovation contests. Methodology: We collected detailed archival data from TopCoder, a leading innovation contest platform that hosts contests across multiple interdependent software development problem domains, from its launch in 2001 to September 2013. Our data set comprises detailed participation histories of 821 contestants in 3,274 contests across eight interdependent problem domains involving 8,985 observations. Results: Whereas a contestant’s related experience on the innovation contest platform is more positively associated with her focal contest performance compared with unrelated experience, the benefits of related experience arise only from downstream experience. That is, there are no significant performance benefits of upstream experience. Furthermore, the performance benefits of downstream experience are greater when the contest duration is shorter, highlighting its role in enabling more efficient search and problem solving in innovation contest platforms with interdependent problem domains. Managerial implications: Contrary to the notion of “hyperspecialization,” our findings suggest that contestants can reap benefits from diversifying their experience into downstream problem domains on innovation contest platforms. Furthermore, innovation contest platforms could facilitate such targeted diversification of contestant experience by developing more granular metrics of contestant experience across problem domains. Our findings also have implications for resource allocation and job rotation decisions in software development projects within firms.

ALL FOR THE MONEY? THE LIMITS OF MONETARY REWARDS IN INNOVATION CONTESTS WITH USERS

Practitioners increasingly use innovation contests to harness the knowledge of external crowds for internal innovation purposes in exchange for prize money. While some innovation contests have the objective to attract professional experts from distant fields to obtain technical solutions, other innovation contests primarily target customers or users in order to generate new product and service ideas. Hence, external crowds differ substantially across, but also within, innovation contests in terms of personal needs in the innovation domain. Drawing upon the private-collective model of innovation, we argue that participants’ “userness” in terms of personal needs gives rise to non-monetary reward expectations and collectively oriented participation as opposed to the private pursuit of monetary rewards emphasised in innovation contests. Hence, the effectiveness of monetary rewards in innovation contests is bound to certain participants and behaviours. In particular, participants weigh non-monetary rewards more strongly against monetary rewards (1) when their personal need in the innovation domain is high, and (2) when choosing to engage collectively in evaluating and commenting on other contributions as opposed to submitting own contributions. We find support for these hypotheses in an empirical study where user participation in a real innovation contest is regressed on survey-based measures of expected rewards that users perceive prior to the contest. The observed effect sizes of the proposed shifts from monetary to non-monetary rewards are so pronounced that for a given level of personal need and a given type of participation behaviour only either reward type is effective and a compensational relation between both types of rewards does not exist. Monetary rewards are even detrimental and lower user participation if the two proposed boundary conditions are taken together.