The Application of an Outstanding Form of Crowdsourcing in an Outstanding Sector

摘要

Open Innovation denotes the more and more emerging paradigm of opening up the borders of companies towards external sources of innovation as well as application of innovations that have been developed internally in external markets and organizations. (Chesbrough 2003) In the space sector, open innovation is not new - it has been applied increasingly for various reasons. A rather recent and more systematic approach to strategically employ external solution capacities represents crowdsourcing. (Howe 2006) While most crowdsourcing efforts both in and outside the space sector are problems of small, well-delimited nature, grand challenges such as the X Prize substantially differ in a number of characteristics. Besides a range of systematic differences to conventional innovation tournaments, an additional contrast becomes salient: Tournaments such as the X-Prize offer very large prizes, yet the prize sum awarded does not attain the level of investment needed for actually claiming the prize. In low-profile settings such as Innocentive-style competitions, a net-positive monetary prize offers a clear incentive to participate. Underlying motivations in such extreme settings so far have remained unexplored, given that 22 of 23 teams in a race for 10 m$ invest substantial amounts but will not win it classical economists are puzzled about this phenomenon from a superficial perspective. Our research thus explores the cases of the Ansari X Prize and the Google Lunar X Prize challenge in order to understand the mechanisms of incentives, motivations and expectations of participants.