A process approach to understanding multiple open source innovation contests - Assessing the contest structures, execution, and participant responses in the android developer challenges

Abstract As organizations recognize the importance of open innovation, understanding emerging mechanisms for soliciting outside participation is a growing area of academic interest. Strategies can be as diverse as hosting innovation contests, sponsoring open source software (OSS) communities, or engaging in bilateral partnerships. While these have been studied as distinct strategies, more recent work has identified the possibility for combining these approaches, or deploying different methods at different times. Because each of these open innovation strategies are characterized by different incentive systems as well as different work and social practices, the combination of these can reveal unexpected participant responses (e.g., collaboration in innovation contests, competitive behavior in OSS communities). This study examines an explicit attempt to combine these strategies, to host an open source innovation contest. Through the case of Google's Android Developer Challenge, a series of multi-million dollar innovation contests used to launch an OSS community over several years, this study utilized a process approach to understanding open source innovation contests to understand how participants responded and also how the contest conditions changed over time. We found several practices of competition and collaboration that worked around the short term and long term incentives and constraints posed by the contest. We also followed the contest through various transition phases and found that participants reacted strongly to changes in structure, execution, and shifting conditions over time. Through this case, we extend our understanding of innovation contests as a process and specifically the promises and pitfalls of open source innovation contests.