Innovation through online communities: effects of reward size on motivation and contributions

Abstract

Scholars found that involving external sources to innovation process has significant influence on innovative performance of companies. One way of the involvement of external sources to innovation activities is opening up the innovation process to online communities. In this paper, we address the factors affecting the contributions of the members of online communities for innovation related tasks that are revealed to those members by companies. To that end, by building on recent psychology literature, a fine- grained conceptual model is developed for reward, motivation and contributions relationships in online communities for innovation related activities. In this way, this paper contributes to both innovation, online communities and psychology literatures. It also provides insights on how to effectively and efficiently obtain knowledge from online communities.