How to Maximize Innovation Efficiency by Balancing Innovative Work and Daily Work

There are lots of research about how to motivate employees to innovate. However, there are still pros and cons about whether financial rewards can motivate employees to innovate. Moreover, previous studies tend to analyze R&D employees, who have specific innovation functions within the corporate. Only little studies explicitly discuss the “ordinary” employees’ innovation. In this paper, we use different combinations of performance rewards and bonuses as financial rewards. We design scenarios involving different financial rewards along with the difficulty of innovation to test how ordinary employees’ innovation is affected by financial rewards by using experiment method. The main aim is to analyze how ordinary employees balance daily work and innovative work, so we fix the total efforts that they can put into their work. This method excludes external factors other than financial rewards, which helps us focus on the essential relationship between financial rewards and innovation. We find that the difficulty of innovation, performance rewards and bonuses will all affect the innovation of employees. However, financial rewards will prompt ordinary employees to over-innovate, thereby affecting their expected earnings. In the long run, financial rewards will affect the incentives of ordinary employees to innovate