Ulrich Bretschneider

Leveraging Crowdsourcing: Activation-Supporting Components for IT-Based Ideas Competition

Ideas competitions appear to be a promising tool for crowdsourcing and open innovation processes, especially for business-to-business software companies. Active participation of potential lead users is the key to success. Yet a look at existing ideas competitions in the software field leads to the conclusion that many information technology (IT)-based ideas competitions fail to meet requirements upon which active participation is established. The paper describes how activation-enabling functionalities can be systematically designed and implemented in an IT-based ideas competition for enterprise resource planning software. We proceeded to evaluate the outcomes of these design measures and found that participation can be supported using a two-step model. The components of the model support incentives and motives of users. Incentives and motives of the users then support the process of activation and consequently participation throughout the ideas competition. This contributes to the successful implementation and maintenance of the ideas competition, thereby providing support for the development of promising innovative ideas. The paper concludes with a discussion of further activation-supporting components yet to be implemented and points to rich possibilities for future research in these areas.

Community for Innovations: Developing an Integrated Concept for Open Innovation

This paper presents a research project called GENIE. It aims at developing a concept for integrating external stakeholders into a company’s innovation management through a virtual community. This novel instrument for opening up a company’s innovation process to external stakeholders enables collaborative creation and implementation of innovations along the entire innovation process. We focus on software companies and aim at developing and testing this approach in several real-world settings.

Leveraging virtual business model innovation: a framework for designing business model development tools

This paper presents a framework for developing tool support for the design and management of new business models. Existing IT tools supporting the process of designing, innovating, and evaluating a companys business model are currently not leveraging the full potential of tool support, because they do not make use of theoretical and empirical knowledge around business model development. Against this backdrop, we analyze existing knowledge on business model design and management, resulting in a first systematization of the activities that are necessary for developing and managing new business models. In order to complement this knowledge and to identify the requirements for supporting these activities, a series of expert interviews is conducted. Based on the results of the interview series, a new business model development tool is created and evaluated. The learnings of this development process are then consolidated in a unified framework. This framework constitutes a new solution for systematically designing tool support for business model development and extends existing literature by highlighting the importance of collaboration between participants in a business model development project. It also provides designers of new business model development tool with an empirically based conceptualization to guide their efforts.

Not just an ego-trip: Exploring backers’ motivation for funding in incentive-based crowdfunding

Incentive-based forms of crowdfunding – such as reward-, equity- and lending-based crowdfunding – are becoming increasingly popular. However, research that studies backers’ motivations for funding in these environments is still in an embryonic state, revealing an inconsistent and narrow picture. The few existing studies are largely guided by the idea that backers are mainly egoistically motivated and do not have prosocial motives. We developed a research model that describes backers’ motivation and conducted an empirical study to examine this model. Results indicate that backers indeed have several self-interest motivations for funding: prospect of a reward; expectation of recognition from others; to lobby a certain project in the hopes of its fruition; and to develop their image. However, some backers are also prosocially motivated in that they develop feelings of liking for a certain venture and/or project team. Furthermore, we found evidence that herding has a significant moderating effect on backers’ reward motivation. Strategic IS researchers as well as crowdfunding practitioners can draw on our findings to systematically design, implement, and evaluate potential incentive systems that respond to reward-, recognition-, lobbying-, image- and liking-motives and thereby attract the crowd more effectively to invest in ventures presented on incentive-based crowdfunding systems.

Crowdfunding: Outlining the New Era of Fundraising

Crowdfunding is increasingly gaining attention in theory and practice. Various platforms have emerged, offering entrepreneurs and project owners the possibility to raise money from an undefined group of online users (“crowd”). In this article we aim to provide a deeper understanding of the rise of crowdfunding as an alternative funding opportunity by discussing its main characteristics, the market development, different classification approaches, its fields of application and by providing directions for future research.

12 Years of GENEX Framework: What did Practice Learn from Science in Terms of Web-Based Ideation?

In Open Innovation, companies open up their innovation activities to external stakeholders. Using web-based ideation platforms (WBIP), companies crowdsource ideas for innovations from their customers. Ideation can be con- sidered as a create process. Therefore, in this research we analyze how current web-based ideation platforms run by firms support Shneidermans GENEX framework that aims at supporting creativity in information systems. By doing so, we were able to identify the state-of-the-art in practice as well as further re- search areas. We analyzed 16 web-based ideation platforms in total. Results in- dicate that current WBIP use creativity tasks different intensive and that some GENEX tasks are already well implemented, while others require further re- search. Results are discussed and theoretical and practical contributions, limita- tions and identified research questions provided.

An Empirical Investigation of Signaling in Reward-Based Crowdfunding

Start-ups often face the challenge of a shortage of capital, the so-called funding gap, which can be overcome by raising small amounts of money from a large number of individuals. As crowdfunding suffers from a continuous rise in failure rates, the aim of this article is to contribute to the research concerning success factors in reward-based crowdfunding campaigns by focusing on signaling theory. Based on data retrieved from the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, our results indicate that social ties, investment preparation and presentation, the supply of multiple rewards as well as endeavors to communicate and interact with the crowd positively influence the probability of success of a reward-based crowdfunding campaign. In contrast, the funding goal, a campaign’s runtime and the estimated time of delivery for the rewards have a negative impact on the successful completion of a campaign.

Collaboration and the Quality of User Generated Ideas in Online Innovation Communities

Enabled by Internet-based technologies, users are increasingly participating and collaborating in idea generation in online innovation communities. Beyond increasing the quantity of ideas contributed by users, firms are looking to obtain innovation ideas of better quality. However, with the limited understanding of the phenomenon, few studies have focused on investigating what determines the quality of collaboratively generated user ideas in online innovation communities. This study aims to address this knowledge gap by investigating the antecedents of the quality of user generated ideas from a knowledge collaboration perspective. Based on this perspective, we propose that idea creation effort, peer co-production, and peer feedback will directly and interactively influence the quality of user generated ideas. The model was tested with archival data from the SAPien’s innovation community as well as idea quality rating data from experts. The results reveal that idea creation effort and peer feedback affect the quality of user generated idea. Further, idea creation effort negatively moderates the relationship between peer co-production and the quality of user generated ideas.

CAN THE CROWD DO THE JOB? EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF INTEGRATING CUSTOMERS INTO A COMPANY’S BUSINESS MODEL INNOVATION

While collaborative business modeling (CBM) constitutes a promising new approach for opening up a company’s innovation process, existing literature lacks empirical evidence of the effects related to this approach. Drawing on related literature on the quality of creative output, this paper proposes that in the context of a CBM initiative, the integration of customers will improve the quality of the generated output. As indicated by the results of our empirical evaluation, customers are indeed capable of developing high quality business models and are able to outperform company experts when it comes to the task of developing new business models.

How to Manage Crowdsourcing Platforms Effectively

To profit from crowdsourcing, organizations can engage in four different approaches: microtasking, information pooling, broadcast search, and open collaboration. This article presents 21 governance mechanisms that can help organizations manage their crowdsourcing platforms. It investigates the effectiveness of these governance mechanisms in 19 case studies and recommends specific configurations of these mechanisms for each of the four crowdsourcing approaches. Also, it offers guidance to organizations that host a crowdsourcing platform by providing recommendations for implementing governance mechanisms into their platforms and building up governance capabilities for crowdsourcing.