Performance Assessment of Co-creation Initiatives: A Conceptual Framework for Measuring the Value of Idea Contests

Abstract

In 2010, more than 1,200 external users from 80 different countries answered an open call by the BMW Group and submitted 1,072 ideas within 8 weeks (Jawecki et al. 2010). The instrument involving users from outside the company in ideation is called an idea contest. The BMW Group’s idea contests are just one example of a plethora of similar initiatives recently taken by leading innovative companies. Since the turn of the millennium, many companies such as 3M (von Hippel et al. 1999), Lego (Moon & Sproull 2001), Ducati Motor (Sawhney et al. 2005, 10–12), Procter & Gamble (Sakkab 2002), and Beiersdorf (Bilgram et al. 2011) have undergone a radical change in innovation strategy by opening up their innovation processes and making external stakeholders a part of their innovation endeavors (Bartl 2006; Brem & Voigt 2007). For example, 3M embarked upon an extensive innovation program involving external lead users to generate breakthrough innovations with a revenue potential eight times higher than that of ideas from conventional ideation approaches (von Hippel et al. 1999). The foundations of this phenomenon have been laid by von Hippel’s seminal work on the Customer Active Paradigm in the late 1970s (von Hippel 1978) and on the sources of innovation outside the company’s walls (von Hippel 1988). Von Hippel found that innovations not only originate from the manufacturers' domain, but also to a large extent from users (von Hippel 1988, 2005).