Leveraging Crowdsourcing:Activation-Supporting Componentsfor IT-Based Ideas Competition

Ideas competitions appear to be a promising tool for crowdsourcing andopen innovation processes, especially for business-to-business software companies.Active participation of potential lead users is the key to success. Yet a look at existingideas competitions in the software field leads to the conclusion that many informationtechnology (IT)–based ideas competitions fail to meet requirements upon whichactive participation is established. The paper describes how activation-enablingfunctionalities can be systematically designed and implemented in an IT-based ideascompetition for enterprise resource planning software. We proceeded to evaluate theoutcomes of these design measures and found that participation can be supported usinga two-step model. The components of the model support incentives and motives ofusers. Incentives and motives of the users then support the process of activation andconsequently participation throughout the ideas competition.[...]