Investigating an ideal crowdsourcing contest from the solvers’ perspective

Idea and crowdsourcing contests play an important role in engaging customers with the firm and its products. By using these contests, the sponsor will know what the costumers’ opinions are. Nowadays, companies and contest platforms are trying to maximize their profit from these crowdsourcing projects. In this article, there are two sections. In the first section, we investigate the factors which are crucial for people to participate in these contests based on previous works and an online survey. In the second section, we review previous papers about the structure of the teams in contests, how to select the best solutions, structure of prizes and some other problems related to the contests which haven’t empirically investigated and meld them with our survey. Our samples came from two sources of solvers. Mellat idea (mellatidea.ir) solvers and problem.ir contestants. We used structural equation modeling for first section and seven-point Likert Scale questions for the second part using SmartPLS 3 and SPSS. The result indicates that people participate in idea contests mostly because of their needs to learn something from this participation and the inner need to be recognized by other firms and people. Also, in the second section we found the people’s preferences about an ideal crowdsourcing contest. The result of this paper will be beneficiary for companies and platforms that want to maximize their benefits from crowdsourcing projects. In the end, the possible limitations discussed and the areas worth further investigations proposed.

Keywords:

Idea Contest , Crowdsourcing Contest , Motivations of contestants , Co-creation , Ideal contest structure