The underlying mechanisms of online open innovation intermediaries

The continuous popularity of open innovation as a methodology for sourcing innovation offers a novel perspective on the increasing value of accessing and competing on innovation. When practicing open innovation, organizations face the challenges of identifying useful solutions and partners in a universe that is no longer confined to the boundaries of the firm, but distributed over sectors, cultural or international boundaries. To address these challenges, online open innovation intermediaries have grown in numbers and achieved a global presence in recent years, leading to an increasing interest in research that explores their roles and functions. However, these intermediaries employ a variety of mechanisms to leverage the motivations of intermediary platform participants (solvers and search agents) and influence their behaviors. There is, however, limited research that specifically explores their different matching mechanisms and consequent outcomes. Accordingly, this analysis defines main mechanism archetypes and a formal analysis through algorithmic mechanism design descriptions. We analyze them in terms of incentive compatibility, reveling the underlying tensions, pitfalls and limitations of existing mechanisms while providing managerial insights on the conditions of their appropriateness.