Study sheds light on what works best in innovation competitions

摘要

What can you do with a competition to wring the highest level of creativity and effort out of the participants? This has been a point of research for Daniel P. Gross, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. In Creativity Under Fire: The Effects of Competition on Creative Production1, he looks at the incentive effects of competition on innovative output -- and offers some insights on how innovation-focused competitions can be most effectively designed to get the desired results. He tells TTT that there are definitely some nuances and paradoxical effects that competition designers should keep in mind. "It can be helpful to have a lot of diversity, a lot of different ideas coming in, but the flip side of that... is that if it is a really crowded field, no one really has much incentive to put a lot of effort into it," notes Gross. "If it is unlikely you are going to win, why bother with a serious push?"