Collaboration in open innovation communities: Do users want it?

Currently, many companies wish to find ways how to integrate their customers or innovative users into their innovation processes. Since earlier studies indicate that collective problem solving improves the quality of the ideas (e.g. Hargadon and Beckhy 2006; Thrift 2006), it is important to find out whether members are willing to collaborate in open innovation communities and how they should be rewarded to motivate collaboration in an innovationprocess. This empirical study aims to find out users' needs and willingness to collaborate and how rewarding can be used to motivate members to collaborate in open innovation communities. The study is a case study (Yin 2003) of three open innovation communities. The studied communities are FellowForce, CrowdSpirit and Owela, which are online open innovation communities acting as innovation intermediaries. Firstly, the results indicate that users see collaboration as an effective and enjoyable way to work and were willing to use more collaboration tools in online communities. Secondly, members gave concrete suggestions on the different kinds of rewarding models within groups. Both ways to reward, monetary and non-monetary ones were emphasised.