Crowdsourcing for Goodness Sake: Impact of Incentive Preference on Contribution Behavior for Social Innovation

Crowdsourcing initiatives, especially the format of idea and research contest have provided companies with unique and inventive opportunities to capitalize on users’ innovative potential and knowledge. Inspired by the potential, nonprofits are beginning to use the principles of crowdsourcing to develop better solutions for social problems. This research aims to enhance our knowledge on crowdsourcing for social innovation. Since the crowdsourcing initiative hinges on individuals' willingness to participate in these projects and their motivation to contribute valuable insights and ideas, we introduce a new framework that aligns participants’ motives with potentially offered incentives. The conducted empirical study at the ScrapLab design contest finds that participants indeed differ in their preferred incentives. It shows that participants not only strive for monetary but also nonmonetary incentives such as an internship, a party with friends, or the support of a social project, once they can choose. The results further highlight, that those participants, differing in their incentive preference, also show different types of contribution behavior. Our research contributes to a better theoretic understanding of the impact of various incentive structures on contribution behavior. From a managerial perspective, it provides guidance in adopting prize structures to justify participation and contribution behavior in crowdsourcing initiatives.