Designing Digital Innovation Contests

In recent years, the phenomena of open data have lent a promise to expand the innovation network of an organization. By allowing this type of access to organizational resources, developers beyond the organizational realm may hence generate new innovative artifacts surpassing existing capabilities. However, as an organization utilizes these innovation capabilities they simultaneously loose significant control over the innovations’ alignment with existing organizational goals. One way to nurture and harness this type of innovation is to arrange a contest where third party developers are invited to attend. Using a Design Science Research approach, such a contest - a type of artifact we coin Digital Innovation Contest - was designed and field-tested in 2011. The contest, WestCoast TravelHack 2011, summoned 76 developers distributed on 20 teams and was based on an idea to both generate novel digital service prototypes and having these applications promote the organizational goal of less energy-consuming ways of everyday travel. We conclude that by following our empirically grounded and theoretically informed guidelines, this type of contest can indeed increase the likelihood of both producing innovative artifacts and aligning these innovations with organizational goals.