Innovation platforms: Intentions for participation

The increasing need to compete in innovation, together with the prevalence of IT in our social and economic interactions, has led to greater globalization in innovation sourcing. One of the best examples of this is the growth of innovation intermediaries and crowdsourcing platforms as markets for innovation. Unlike the Open Source model, these platforms allow intrinsic and extrinsic motives to interact and motivate participants, a phenomenon scantly covered in extant research. Accordingly, a better understanding of participants' motivations can guide the design and management of these platforms. Data were collected through interviews, as well as through a web- based survey of the Atizo community, an innovation intermediary, and Nokia's IdeasProject community, a corporate initiative crowdsourcing platform. The latter was designed based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) though augmented to partition both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators. This study also reveals that the differences between two type of platforms but still platform participants are motivated by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors, though intrinsic rather than extrinsic motives predominate. Specifically, enjoyment and sense of self-worth are the underlying intrinsic motives. The impact of attitude is greater than norms on intention to participate in innovation challenges. Furthermore, a self-assessed participation model is not as accurate and correlates negatively with a real participation model.