Understanding Collaborator's Motivations for Participating in Non-Pecuniary Open Innovation, a Systematic Literature Review

Abstraksi

Open innovation is an important global phenomenon where businesses are creating innovation through knowledge flows beyond its organizational boundaries. The balanced knowledge distribution around the world and the development of information technology has allowed different parties at different places to collaborate in unison. Open innovation especially good for expedite internal innovation, increase innovation adoption, and expand market reach. As firms increasingly search for external solutions, an obvious problem is how to motivate collaborators to engage. An even more critical problem is how to motivate people to engage when there is no promise of immediate monetary gain, something that has been termed non-pecuniary open innovation. The growing importance of non-pecuniary open innovation (OI) is exemplified by several trends, such as the uptick in OI contests and crowd-sourcing. Contests to connect solution seekers (often businesses) with solution providers (often individuals or groups) are conducted by firms or OI intermediaries, such as NineSigma, which organizes innovation contests worth over USD $25 million a year. Crowd-sourcing, using the creativity of crowds to find ideas, is widely used. One example is that of open source software (OSS), where source code is made freely available to be redistributed/modified. There are now over 38 million collaborative projects listed on GitHub, one of the largest OSS platforms. In the examples described above, the exchange of knowledge occurs in the absence of financial transaction. Motivating collaborators is particularly important for firms wanting to harness the power of the crowd. While the low cost of crowd-sourcing is attractive, firms are faced with lackluster innovation results because of low engagement, high rates of contributor turnover, and under-performing ideas . Attracting contributors into product development efforts is another important problem. For example, to examine the practicality of prototypes, to secure help in scaling-up an innovation, or even to develop product extensions to support existing business models . Although individuals may potentially be rewarded financially in the form of a prize, this type of interaction contains much more financial uncertainty than one through which they purchase well-defined intellectual property. Further, firms that invite others to participate in iterative feedback on product development exercises likely do so because the pure-market mechanisms are not appropriate for facilitating such knowledge flows . This is because, although co-development activities are undertaken to improve chances of commercialization, knowledge transfers that underpin this type of collaboration are not market-based. The phenomenon of transferring knowledge without a direct financial transaction is referred to as non-pecuniary OI . It occurs when knowledge (e.g. ideas, intellectual property, patents) is exchanged without involving a direct market-based transaction between the parties. This phenomenon is distinct from pecuniary OI, which involves exchange of such knowledge using a market transaction, licensing fees, R&D contracts, or outsourcing. Accordingly, our study is aimed to answer the following question: what motivates engagement in non-pecuniary OI? The relevant literature is extensive, resulting in several mutually exclusive as well as overlapped elements. To address this question, we conducted a systematic literature review and thematic analysis of OI research. First, substantive keywords and search terms were identified and a matrix of potential combinations that characterize the phenomenon was developed. Second, potentially relevant articles were retrieved using the Web of Science database. Third, non-applicable articles were excluded from the database based upon a reading of the abstracts. Fourth, remaining texts were read in full, and further irrelevant articles were removed. Fifth, to overcome the potential for inconsistent terminology that may result in excluding relevant works, seminal texts and articles known to the authors, but not captured, were re-included. Similarly, sixth, important texts referenced in the papers were added into the sample using a snowball method. Following these steps, we conduct a thematic analysis of the relevant set of papers. NVivoTM was used to manage and categorize codes and themes, and group similar concepts. We arrived in a final list of 11 motivational themes from the contributor perspective and five motivational themes from the focal firm perspective. Individual motivations include: hedonism, financial interest, reputation building, personal development, career development, altruism, utilitarianism, ideology, sense of community, reciprocity, and self-efficacy. Firm level motivations include: establishing complementary products, gaining access to knowledge, cost reduction, market growth, and social good. In identifying motivations and their relationships, we conclude that, while temporality is important to OI motivation, it is under-researched in the literature. Many argue that motivation is stable when it is a dynamic process, with motivations of individuals and firms changing over time. Most importantly, we find that what initially may seem as non-pecuniary motivations are often tied to longer-term pecuniary motives, especially in the OI context. Therefore, we conceptualize another type of motivation: delayed-pecuniary motivation, involving a set of drivers that initially seem to be unrelated to finance, but the long term shows otherwise. Instead of expecting direct financial benefit for contributing, such individuals are willing to wait to reap the rewards. In addition, they do not expect the benefit to come directly from their participation. Reasons like personal development, reputational building, reciprocity, utilitarianism, career development, and a sense of community are only indirectly related to direct financial rewards, so performance-based incentives might be not effective. Alternative interventions might be more successful if they create an environment that encourages participation motivated by learning, growth, and community building.