The Study On The Influences Of The Incentives In Innovation Contests On The Individual Innovation Behavior

Contests are historically important and increasingly popular economic instrumentfor eliciting innovations. In an innovation contest, a firm (the seeker) facing aninnovation-related problem (e.g., a technical R&D problem) posts this problem to apopulation of independent agents (the solvers) and then provides an award to the agentthat generated the best solution. It establishes that the seeker can benefit from a largersolver population because he obtains a more diverse set of solutions. The innovationcommunities which are the bridges of seekers and solvers provide a place for seekers topost problems and solvers to submit the solutions. Prior researches have proved that thetotal achievement is influenced by individual’s effort. To attract and to commit users toparticipate in innovation contests, it is important to know the motivations of themembers and ways to enhance commitment. One way to motivate members toparticipate is to reward them by monetary or non-monetary rewards.In this paper, we analyze the effect between incentives and the contestants’innovative behavior in contests. Through the current literature and theory, we know thatthe process and reward of contest, characteristic and motivation of contestants. Thedimensions of contestants’ innovative behavior are discussed, too. The data wascollected by questionnaire of contestants. Then we use the AMOS17.0to inspect theeffect between the two variables. The results indicate that incentives have a positiveimpact on contestants’ innovation behavior. And the four rewards including monetaryand social rewarding and problem rewarding and context rewarding also have positiveimpacts on contestants’innovation behavior.