Innovation Contests

2,232, 4,298, 26,617, 8,582 . . . these are key figures of a recent IT-based innovation contest conducted by Bombardier (http://yourail-design.bombardier.com). This initiative aimed at identifying “new and innovative interior designs for trains”. The numbers mentioned at the beginning of this article hence spell out in the following manner: During a ten weeks period, 2,232 persons participated in the innovation contest by submitting 4,298 designs, immense 26,617 ratings, and 8,582 comments on competing submissions. Thus, by an IT-based innovation management tool, even a B2B company like Bombardier can get in touch with end users and other outside experts (e.g., designers). Bombardier took advantage of the worldwide innovative potential (by calling for submissions), to gather firsthand customer insights (by evaluation of submissions, ratings, and comments), and, even more, it spread the word about the company as participants voluntarily acted as word of mouth marketers. While an organizational innovation to Bombardier, the principle of innovation contests is tried and tested. Early examples date back more than 450 years, when the king of Spain initiated the Spanish Longitude Prize to discover a method to find longitude at sea (Masters and Delbecq 2008). In the course of time, innovation contests have first been applied by public institutions which used their reputation and financial power to stimulate participation. Since the beginning of the 19th century, also industry has organized innovation contests. One early example of this time is the Billiard Ball Prize, which granted $ 10,000 for a suitable substitute for ivory to make billiard balls (Masters and Delbecq 2008). Nowadays, with the global availability of broadband access to the World Wide Web, IT-based innovation contests are used for a broad range of tasks – from designing wristbands for watches (e.g., Swarovski) to solving complex scientific problems (e.g., XPrize foundation). Innovation contests allow tapping into the wisdom of the crowd (Surowiecki 2004) and integrating interested customers, end users, partners, and other outside innovators (Neyer et al. 2009) into the innovative activities of an organization. This open innovation approach follows the assumption of Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, that “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Integration of interested innovators allows access to both, participants’ tacit knowledge concerning needs (need information) – and their expertise with problem solving (solution information). Advances in innovation technology impact the opportunities to globally tap into this knowledge, making innovation contests a powerful tool for a variety of goals.