How innovation tournaments promote makers' product innovation: economic or social incentives?

Abstract

Purpose

Research on makers and innovation has been equivocal regarding whether maker innovation is driven by internal motivation or external incentives. The motivation view favors the intrinsic motives of makers, whereas the incentive view supports external economic incentives. The authors combine both views to explore how innovation tournaments promote the product innovation outcomes of different creative and entrepreneurial makers, using economic incentives (money) or social incentives (love).

Design/methodology/approach

The authors interviewed 42 makers and collected a panel dataset of 29,823 makers from the largest digital maker community in China using a Python crawling program. The authors analyzed the data using multiple methods, including cluster analysis, discriminant analysis, factor analysis and negative binomial regression.

Findings

Compared with entrepreneurial makers, the product productivity of creative makers is inferior, but their product popularity is greater. The social incentive of innovation tournaments promotes the product productivity and popularity of creative makers compared with that of entrepreneurial makers, but the economic incentive is contradictory. In addition, social and economic incentives interact to generate inconsistent influences.

Originality/value

The study identifies creative and entrepreneurial makers and contributes to user innovation and innovation tournaments by integrating motivation and incentive views.

Citation

Xiao, T., Yang, C., Yang, Z. and Wang, X. (2023), "How innovation tournaments promote makers' product innovation: economic or social incentives?", Management Decision, Vol. 61 No. 7, pp. 2099-2139. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-06-2022-0828