developing a new global idea creation platform – case idea marketplace

Aalto University

School of Science

Degree Programme of Information Networks

Karoliina Harjanne

Developing a New Global Idea Creation Platform

– Case Idea Marketplace

Master’s Thesis

Espoo, March 14, 2011

Supervisor: Eila Järvenpää

Instructor: Minna Takala, Lic.Sc. (Tech.)

Aalto University

School of Science

Degree programme of Information Networks

ABSTRACT OF THE MASTER’S THESIS

Author: Karoliina Harjanne

Title: Developing a New Global Idea Creation Platform – Case Idea Marketplace

Number of pages: 115 Date: March 14, 2011 Language: English

Professorship: Work Psychology and Leadership

Code: TU-53

Supervisor: Eija Järvenpää, professor

Instructor: Minna Takala, Lic.Sc. (Tech.)

Abstract:

Social media has become an inseparable part of the modern society, and companies are currently competing for consumers’ time with their own online communities. Companies use social media not only to enhance brand image or attract people to buy products and services, but also to make people innovate, design and concept products and services for themselves. This sub-phenomenon of social media is called crowdsourcing. Despite the vast hype, only few companies know how to actually utilize social media and get the best out of it.

This study was made at the Company to support the design and implementation process of a new idea crowdsourcing site that is to be launched in spring 2011. The research question of the study is “How to get organizations’ employees, customers and other stakeholders to use the new idea crowdsourcing site to support the idea creation process?” The objectives of the study are as follows:

To identify the known motivations, features and roles of online communities from the literature,

to validate the identified motivations, features and roles of users in the context of idea crowdsourcing and to complete them with findings from end-user survey, observation and expert interviews, and

to provide recommendations on how to build a new idea marketplace that will attract a high variety of consumers globally

The literature review offered a list of motivators to be validated empirically in idea creation context. It appeared that similar factors motivate users to participate in an idea marketplace as in any other online community. Elements from all motivational themes are recommended to include in all idea crowdsourcing challenges.

Basic features of online communities were covered in the literature review, but interviews concretized them and linked them tightly to motivators. Features enable motivations, but on the other hand, the according motivation motivates using the feature. Some features are linked to two motivations instead of one. The synthesis presents the recommended features.

The literature review specified 55 separate roles, which were cut down into two user roles, normal users and lead users, and a few supporting roles based on the case study. The behavior from a normal user to a lead user changes very sharply after only a few posts. Motivational differences between these two groups were also discovered.

Keywords: online community, social media, idea crowdsourcing, role, motivation, feature

Aalto-yliopisto

Perustieteiden korkeakoulu

Informaatioverkostojen tutkinto-ohjelma

DIPLOMITYÖN TIIVISTELMÄ

Tekijä: Karoliina Harjanne

Työn nimi: Uutta globaalia ideointiympäristöä kehittämässä – Case Idea Marketplace

Sivumäärä: 115 Päiväys: 14.3.2011 Julkaisukieli: Englanti

Professuuri: Työpsykologia ja johtaminen Professuurikoodi: TU-53

Työn valvoja: Eija Järvenpää, professori

Työn ohjaaja: Minna Takala, tekniikan lisensiaatti

Tiivistelmä:

Sosiaalisesta mediasta on tullut erottamaton osa nyky-yhteiskuntaa ja tänäpäivänä yritykset kilpailevat kuluttajien ajasta omilla verkkoyhteisöillään. Yrityskuvan ja markkinoinnin lisäksi yritykset käyttävät sosiaalista media nykyään myös saadakseen kuluttajat innovoimaan, suunnittelemaan ja konseptoimaan tuotteita itselleen. Tätä sosiaalisen median alalajia kutsutaan talkouttamiseksi. Sosiaalisen median saamasta suuresta huomiosta huolimatta yritykset eivät vieläkään tiedä kuinka parhaiten hyödyntää sitä liiketoiminnassaan.

Tämä tutkimus on tehty Nokia Corporationille uuden ideatalkouttamissivuston suunnittelun ja toteuttamisen tueksi, joka tullaan avaamaan yleisölle keväällä 2011. Tutkimuksessa pyritään selvittämään kuinka organisaation työntekijät, asiakkaat ja muut sidosryhmät saataisiin käyttämään ideatalkouttamissivustoa ideointiprosessin tukena. Tutkimuksen tavoitteet ovat seuraavat:

tunnistaa kirjallisuudesta tiedossa olevat verkkoyhteisöjen motivaatiot, toiminnallisuudet ja roolit

validoida tunnistetut motivaatit, toiminnallisuudet ja roolit ideatalkouttamiskontekstissa ja täydentää niitä uusilla tuloksilla loppukäyttäjäkyselystä, havainnoinnista ja asiantuntijahaastatteluista

tarjota suosituksia erilaisia kuluttajia ympäri mailmaa houkuttelevan ideatalkouttamissivuston toteuttamiseen

Kirjallisuuskatsaus tarjosi listan motivaatioita validoitavaksi empiirisesti ideointikontekstissa. Tutkimuksessa selvisi, että samantyyppiset motivaatiot pätevät niin ideointiyhteisöihin kuin muihinkin verkkoyhteisöihin. Kaikkia motivaatioteemoja suositellaan hyödynnettävän kaikissa ideatalkouttamiskilpailuissa.

Verkkoyhteisöjen perustoiminnallisuudet selvitettiin kirjallisuuskatsauksessa, mutta haastattelut konkretisoivat toiminnallisuudet ja sitoivat ne eri motivaatioihin. Toiminnallisuudet mahdollistavat motivaatiot, mutta toisaalta myös motivoivat käyttämään toiminnallisuutta. Jotkut toiminnallisuudet liittyvät useaan motivaatioon. Synteesi esittelee suositellut toiminnallisuudet.

Kirjalllisuuskatsauksessa eriteltiin 55 roolia, jotka lopulta supistettiin kahteen ylätason rooliin, tavallisiin käyttäjiin ja johtaviin käyttäjiin, sekä tukirooleihin. Käyttäjien roolin havaittiin muuttuvan nopeasti tavallisista käyttäjistä johtaviksi heti muutaman viestin jälkeen. Myös näiden roolien eroavaisuudet motivaatoissa selvitettiin.

Asiasanat: verkkoyhteisö, sosiaalinen media, ideatalkoo, rooli, motivaatio, toiminnallisuus

Karoliina Harjanne

Master's Thesis: Developing a New Global Idea Creation Platform – Case Idea Marketplace

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

After 18 years of school, 6 years of university studies and almost a year of a thesis

process there are certainly a few people to thank.

At first, I want to thank my parents for encouraging me all this time and teaching

the importance of working hard.

Thank you, Minna Takala, for arranging me this awesome opportunity to make my

master’s thesis on such an interesting topic for such an interesting company, and

thanks for helping all the way. Thank you, Matthew Hanwell, for enabling this

arrangement and being always so patient. I also want to thank Eila Järvenpää for

being so flexible, warm, helpful and constructive during this whole process. I

couldn’t have gotten better supervisor.

Special thanks go to Pia Erkinheimo and her absolutely fantastic team – it has been

pure pleasure to work with all of you guys! In practice, Pia has been my instructor

on behalf of Nokia and kindly helping always when needed.

Last but not least, I want to thank SK-klubi for making my student life so hilarious

and hard times a bit less hard, and of course my dear husband Atte, who has been

cooking and cleaning up for the last busy weeks and even printed this thesis. Thank

you.

In Austin, 14rd of March, 2011

Karoliina Harjanne

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Table of Contents

PART I: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1

1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1

1.1 BACKGROUND ........................................................................................................................1

1.2 RESEARCH QUESTION AND OBJECTIVES ..................................................................................5

1.3 SCOPE AND THE STRUCTURE OF THE STUDY ...........................................................................5

PART II: LITERATURE REVIEW .......................................................................................... 8

2. IDEA CREATION ............................................................................................................. 8

2.1 DEFINITIONS .........................................................................................................................8

2.2 INNOVATION PROCESSES........................................................................................................9 2.2.1 Open Innovation Paradigm ....................................................................................... 12

2.3 CROWDSOURCING IN IDEA CREATION .................................................................................. 13

2.4 SUMMARY OF FINDINGS ...................................................................................................... 14

3. MOTIVATION TO USE ONLINE COMMUNITIES ........................................................... 16

3.1 INTRINSIC AND EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION.............................................................................. 16

3.2 TWO FACTOR THEORY OF MOTIVATION ............................................................................... 17

3.3 MOTIVATIONS TO USE ONLINE COMMUNITIES...................................................................... 18 3.3.1 Extrinsic motivations in online communities ........................................................... 18 3.3.2 Intrinsic motivations in online communities ............................................................ 20 3.3.3 Reward and creativity ............................................................................................... 21

3.4 SUMMARY OF MOTIVATIONS ................................................................................................ 22

4. ROLES OF USERS IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES ............................................................. 25

4.1 ROLES OF USERS IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES AROUND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE PROJECTS .... 27

4.2 ROLES OF USERS IN ONLINE LEARNING COMMUNITIES ......................................................... 29

4.3. ROLES OF USERS IN ONLINE BRAND COMMUNITIES ............................................................. 31

4.4 ROLES OF USERS IN A GUILD COMMUNITY ........................................................................... 32

4.5 ROLES OF USERS IN ONLINE TECHNOLOGY COMMUNITIES .................................................... 33

4.6 ROLE OF LEADER IN ONLINE GROUPS ................................................................................... 35

4.7 SUMMARY ........................................................................................................................... 36

5. IDEA CREATION TOOLS AND FUNCTIONS IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES ...................... 40

5.1 COLLABORATION FEATURES IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES ......................................................... 40

5.2 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS .................................................................................. 42 5.2.1 Knowledge-enabled innovation management systems ............................................ 43

5.3 SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES .......................................................................... 45

5.4 FUNCTIONS IN DIFFERENT PHASES OF THE IDEA CREATION PROCESS ................................... 46 5.4.1 Idea generation/ identification stage ....................................................................... 47 5.4.2 Concept definition stage ............................................................................................ 49 5.4.3 Concept feasibility and refinement stage ................................................................. 49 5.4.4 Portfolio stage ........................................................................................................... 49 5.4.5 Deployment stage ...................................................................................................... 49

5.5 CASE FACEBOOK ................................................................................................................. 50

5.6 SUMMARY ........................................................................................................................... 51

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6. SYNTHESIS OF THE LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................. 54

PART III: USE CASE STUDY ............................................................................................. 56

7. METHODOLOGY OF THE STUDY .................................................................................. 56

7.1 SURVEY .............................................................................................................................. 58

7.2 OBSERVATION .................................................................................................................... 59

7.3 INTERVIEWS ....................................................................................................................... 60

8 THE CASE COMPANY ..................................................................................................... 62

8.1 EXISTING IDEA CREATION PLATFORMS ................................................................................ 63 8.1.1 Idea generation in the Company’s innovation funnel .............................................. 63 8.1.2 Conversion and concepting in the Company’s innovation funnel ............................ 64 8.1.3 Diffusion in the Company’s innovation funnel .......................................................... 64

8.2 IDEA MARKETPLACE ............................................................................................................ 65 8.2.1 Features ..................................................................................................................... 65 8.2.2 Roles ........................................................................................................................... 66 8.2.3 Motivations ................................................................................................................ 67

9 RESULTS ........................................................................................................................ 69

9.1 RESULTS FROM THE OBSERVATION OF DELL’S IDEASTORM .................................................. 69 9.1.1 Normal users .............................................................................................................. 69 9.1.2 Lead users .................................................................................................................. 72 9.1.3 Moderators ................................................................................................................ 74 9.1.4 Summary of the observation results ......................................................................... 75

9.2 SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE RESULTS ...................................................................................... 76 9.2.1 Motivators of lead users versus normal users .......................................................... 80

9.3 INTERVIEW RESULTS ........................................................................................................... 83 9.3.1 Concept of the Idea Marketplace .............................................................................. 83 9.3.2 Motivations ................................................................................................................ 87 9.3.3 Roles ........................................................................................................................... 91 9.3.4 Features of an idea marketplace .............................................................................. 96

9.4 SYNTHESIS OF THE CASE STUDY ....................................................................................... 103

PART IV: DISCUSSION ................................................................................................... 108

10. STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF THE STUDY .................................................... 112

11. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH .................................................... 113

12. MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS .................................................................................. 114

REFERENCES ................................................................................................................... 116

INTERNET SOURCES ...................................................................................................... 127

APPENDIX 1: SURVEY FORM .......................................................................................... 131 MOTIVATION SURVEY ABOUT IDEATION ......................................................................................... 131 BACKGROUND INFORMATION ....................................................................................................... 131 MOTIVATIONAL QUESTIONS......................................................................................................... 132

APPENDIX 2: INTERVIEWEES ........................................................................................ 140

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List of Figures

FIGURE 1 RELATIONS OF USED TERMS ................................................................... 4

FIGURE 2 RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND METHODS OF THE STUDY ............................. 6

FIGURE 3 CYCLIC INNOVATION MODEL (CIM) (BERKHOUT & HARTMANN, 2006) ..... 11

FIGURE 4 OPEN INNOVATION PARADIGM (CHESBROUGH, 2003) ............................. 13

FIGURE 5 EXTRINSIC AND INTRINSIC MOTIVATIONS AS WELL AS MOTIVATORS AND HYGIENE FACTORS DISPLAYED AS SUBSETS .......................................................... 24

FIGURE 6 FRAMEWORK OF A KNOWLEDGE-ENABLED INNOVATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (KIMS) SUPPORTED BY KM 2.0 TECHNOLOGIES (RIBIERE AND TUGGLE, 2010) ........................................................................................................................... 45

FIGURE 7 THE FUGLE INNOVATION PROCESS (PREEZ & LOUW, 2008) [MODIFIED] .. 47

FIGURE 8 SYNTHESIS OF THE LITERATURE REVIEW .............................................. 55

FIGURE 9 COMPANY'S INNOVATION FUNNEL ......................................................... 63

FIGURE 10 IDEA CHALLENGE PROCESS IN THE IDEA MARKETPLACE ....................... 66

FIGURE 11 MOTIVATORS TO PARTICIPATE IN IDEA CROWDSOURCING CHALLENGES ........................................................................................................................... 68

FIGURE 12 ROLES IDENTIFIED FROM INTERVIEWS ................................................ 96

FIGURE 13A SYNTHESIS OF THE USE CASE STUDY ............................................... 106

FIGURE 13B SYNTHESIS OF THE USE CASE STUDY ............................................... 107

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List of Tables

TABLE 1 USERS' MOTIVATIONS TO PARTICIPATE IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES (ANTIKAINEN ET AL., 2010) [MODIFIED] ............................................................... 23

TABLE 2 OCCURRENCE OF ROLES IN ONLINE LERNING COMMUNITIES (YEH, 2010), [MODIFIED] ......................................................................................................... 30

TABLE 3 ROLES OF USERS IN ONLINE COMMUNITIES IDENTIFIED FROM THE LITERATURE ........................................................................................................ 37

TABLE 4 TOOLS AND METHODS FOR COLLABORATION (ANTIKAINEN ET AL., 2010) [MODIFIED] ......................................................................................................... 42

TABLE 5 EXAMPLES OF ACTIONS ENABLING THE INTERACTIVITY BETWEEN THE CUSTOMERS AND THE CROWD WITH THE INTERNAL INNOVATION PROCESS (RIBIERE AND TUGGLE, 2010) ............................................................................................. 44

TABLE 6 FREQUENCY OF MENTIONS OF REASONS TO USE FACEBOOK (JOINSON, 2008) .................................................................................................................. 51

TABLE 7 SUMMARY OF TOOLS AND FUNCTIONS OF CHAPTER 5 .............................. 53

TABLE 8 MOTIVATIONS TO PARTICIPATE IN THE IDEA MARKETPLACE .................... 79

TABLE 9 COMPARING TOP 5 MOTIVATIONS OF LEAD USERS AND NORMAL USERS ... 81

TABLE 10 COMPARING MOTIVATORS OF LEAD USERS AND NORMAL USERS ............ 82

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PART I: INTRODUCTION

1. Introduction

1.1 Background

Social media has become an inseparable part of the modern society. After 2004,

when Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook (Facebook, 2010), the world has rapidly

become a world of social media, online communities and crowdsourcing.

Social media refers to "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the

ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, which allows the creation and

exchange of user-generated content" (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Currently,

consumers are voluntarily using dozens of social media sites. The most popular of

them include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and Ning (eBizMBA, 2010).

At the same time, companies are competing for consumers’ time with their own

online communities in social media. By online community, we refer to “a group of

people who use computer networks as their primary mode of interaction” (Cothrel &

Williams, 1999a). 79 percent of Fortune Global 100 companies use at least one

social media channel (Burson-Marsteller, 2010), and social media adoption by

small companies has even doubled from 2009 to 2010. Two-thirds of the world’s

100 largest companies are using Twitter and over a half of them has a Facebook

page. Majority of small companies use social media to identify and attract new

customers. (Solis, 2010) Furthermore, companies are planning to increase their

marketing efforts in social media tremendously (Bloch, 2010). 80 percent of

companies use social media also for recruiting (Qualman, 2010).

Despite the popularity of social media services, only few companies know how to

actually utilize social media. Although 69 percent of American companies have a

Facebook page, only 32 percent have posts with comments from fans (Axon, 2010)

and not more than 59 percent of the Fortune Global 100 firms have hired

employees to carry out core social media tasks, like customer outreach, PR,

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marketing and internal communications (Social Media Influence, 2010). Less than

half of companies said they had a strategic plan to guide social media activities, and

only 69 percent of those measured the return on investment of social media

activities. And what is more, just 12 percent of companies had defined social media

policies for employees. (O’Malley, 2010) It seems that in the middle of the social

media hype, companies have just concentrated on establishing a must-have social

media site and forgotten that not having customers involved erodes the whole

purpose of social media. Online community is not a community without people.

Companies really have to get customers committed to get the benefit. For instance,

companies with 100 to 500 Twitter followers make 146 percent more leads than

those with 21 to 100 followers (eMarketer 2010).

Social media has raised a sub-phenomenon called crowdsourcing. The inventor of

the term, Jeff Howe (2006b), defines crowdsourcing as follows:

“Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking

a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and

generally large) network of people in the form of an open call . . . The crucial

prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential

laborers.” (Jeff Howe, 2006b)

In other words, companies could use social media not only to enhance brand image

or attract people to buy products, but also to encourage people innovate, design

and concept products for companies. Basically, crowdsourcing is already used in

every stage of product development process from marketing (Starbucks

Corporation, 2010) to R&D (InnoCentive, 2010). The benefits of including

customers are obvious – an end-user point of view will be ensured, which enhances

usability and usefulness of the product.

Several companies have already seen the opportunity of crowdsourcing. The most

popular examples of these companies and their crowdsourcing sites include IBM’s

Collaboration Jam (IBM, 2008), Google Ideas (Google, 2009), Starbucks (Starbucks

Corporation, 2010), OpenIDEO (Ideo, 2011) and InnoCentive (InnoCentive, 2010).

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There will be more of them, since several software suppliers base their business

idea on similar idea market places. The leading suppliers include Accept Ideas

(Accept Software 2010), Jive Software (Jive Software, 2010), Imaginatik

(Imaginatik plc, n.d.) and Spigit (Spigit, n.d.).

Popular social media and crowdsourcing sites confirm that people want to

participate and they can be committed. However, the dilemma of participation

remains. Not all companies have managed to make their online community success.

Nokia Corporation (hereafter referred to as “the Company”), the world’s leading

mobile phone manufacturer, has also already developed and taken into use several

social media and even crowdsourcing sites, but none of them is used corporate-

wide and none of them actually “flies” nor is known by millions of people. However,

this is something that the Company has decided to do – to design and implement a

new comprehensive crowdsourcing site. The Company even has a particular task

for the site, to bring more ideas, which will then be developed into innovations and

real products and services. This new site will gather all ideas from consumers,

employees and stakeholders in one place and deliver them to developers for

development. From this point on, this kind of idea crowdsourcing sites will be

called idea marketplaces.

Figure 1 illustrates further the relation of used terms. The figure implies that an

idea marketplace is one kind of online community. An idea marketplace uses

crowdsourcing as an idea generation method, and crowdsourcing is one type of

social media.

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Figure 1 Relations of used terms

This study is made for the Company1 to find out what would make the Company’s

idea marketplace attractive for customers, when the number of similar services is

rapidly growing and an increasing amount of companies are fighting for the

“wisdom of the crowd”. The wisdom of the crowd refers to the process of taking into

account the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than a single expert

(Surowiecki, 2004). However, the overall goal of the study is to learn about the

phenomenon of idea crowdsourcing in general and use the Company as a case,

where the theory is being applied.

In particular, open questions include what motivates people to participate in idea

crowdsourcing and what roles, as well as features, an idea marketplace should

have. Roles, motivations and features of online communities have already been

studied but no studies in the context of idea creation were found. Therefore, this

study will offer new research results of the branch of idea crowdsourcing and

needed practical implications for the use of the Company at the same time.

1 The Company is introduced in chapter 8

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1.2 Research question and objectives

The research problem of this thesis is:

“How to get organizations’ employees, customers and other stakeholders to use a new

idea marketplace to support the idea creation process?”

The research question can be divided into following sub-questions, which are of

special interest for the Company:

- What motivates people to contribute to an idea marketplace?

- What features should an idea marketplace have?

- What kind of roles do the users of an idea marketplace have?

The objectives of the thesis are as follows:

- To identify the known motivations, features and roles of online communities

from the literature,

- to validate the identified motivations, features and roles in the context of idea

crowdsourcing and to complete them with findings from end-user survey,

observation and expert interviews, and

- to provide recommendations on how to build a new idea marketplace that will

attract a high variety of consumers globally

1.3 Scope and the structure of the study

This research consists of three parts, the first of which is introduction. Second part

consists of a literature review. The beginning of the literature review presents the

major applicable innovation processes for the context of this study. The third

chapter concentrates on motivations which would make people come and see an

idea marketplace or other online community in the first place but also make them

come back over and over again. The fourth chapter introduces selected studies on

roles in online communities, while the fifth proposes an exhaustive list of different

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features that support idea creation processes as well as the overall functions of idea

marketplaces.

The third part consists of the material and methods. At first, the case company is

introduced. Next, the roles of users are studied by observing IdeaStorm by Dell Inc.,

an established idea marketplace. Motivations of end users are explored as follows.

An Internet based inquiry is done based on the results of the literature review.

Features of idea marketplaces are examined further by interviewing selected social

media experts and developers of successful idea crowdsourcing sites. These

developers include people from internal and external innovation communities.

The fourth part concludes the study presenting discussion: conclusions, strengths

and weaknesses of the study, recommendations and managerial implications.

Figure 2 below illustrates the relations between the research question, sub-

questions and research methods.

Figure 2 Research questions and methods of the study

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Numerous factors influence the development of new idea marketplaces and

determine whether such services really enhance idea creation processes or not. For

instance, marketing efforts and communication can have an effect on how people

are planned to get to use an idea marketplace. However, this point of view is out of

the scope of this study.

Instead of innovations, this study concentrates on ideas in particular. Ideas are

nothing alone, but if they turn into innovations, they can bring some commercial

value for the company, which is the final goal of the Company. On the other hand,

innovations start from ideas, and that is why they are important and constitute the

focus of this study.

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PART II: LITERATURE REVIEW

2. Idea creation

2.1 Definitions

An idea-related literature often concerns both ideas and innovations but usually

refers only to innovations. This study refers to such sources too (e.g. Antikainen et

al., 2010; Barsh et al., 2007; Desouza et al., 2009), but for the sake of consistence,

deals with ideas and idea creation. That is why it is important to define both idea

creation and innovation and clarify the difference between them.

Several definitions for innovation exist (Luecke & Katz, 2003; Baregheh et al., 2009,

Schumpeter, 1934). One of the classical definitions by Luecke & Katz (2003) defines

innovation as follows:

“Innovation . . . is generally understood as the successful introduction of a new thing

or method . . . Innovation is the embodiment, combination, or synthesis of knowledge

in original, relevant, valued new products, processes, or services.“

Another, more recent definition by Baregheh et al. (2009) takes the definition to

the context of positioning in the market:

“Innovation is the multi-stage process whereby organizations transform ideas into

new/improved products, service or processes, in order to advance, compete and

differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace.”

However, in this study we are referring especially to the following definition by

Amabile et al. (1996), because it defines innovation through ideas:

“We define innovation as the successful implementation of creative ideas within an

organization. In this view, creativity by individuals and teams is a starting point for

innovation; the first is necessary but not sufficient condition for the second. Successful

innovation depends on other factors as well and it can stem not only from creative

ideas that originate within an organization but also from ideas that originate

elsewhere (as in technology transfer).”

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In other words, ideas exist before innovations and are a necessary precondition for

them.

Although this study concentrates on ideas, the following chapter introduces the

innovation context. This approach was chosen as idea creation is a necessary part

of innovation process, and because academic idea creation processes were not

found. In addition, innovations are the final goal of ideas. In following, the

development of innovation processes is presented, as well as Open Innovation

paradigm, which forms an ideological basis for idea marketplaces from the

innovation point of view.

2.2 Innovation processes

Over the past years, innovations have become the top priority for companies to

remain competitive in the knowledge economy. Several studies report the

importance of innovation management initiatives (AMA, 2006; Barsh et al., 2007;

Capgemini, 2008; IBM, 2006).

Nearly two thirds of the organizational value consists of intellectual capital

(O’Donnell et al., 2003). Innovation failure rates can reach even the rate of 86

percent (Barbier et al., 2007) primarily because end users do not adopt the

innovations. This, again, is because innovation developers lack the knowledge of

user’s preferences and requirements. (Ribiere & Tuggle, 2010)

Furthermore, the demand for ideas and innovations has rapidly increased, thus

forcing companies to look for new sources of ideas from related industries or

collaboration, of which collaboration offers a cost-effective option for companies.

Involving customers to the idea creation process may also make it easier for them

to adopt the innovation later. (Antikainen et al., 2010) Furthermore, collective

thinking is more effective than innovation of separated user (Hargadon & Bechky,

2006). Customers also appreciate that their opinions are listened. In addition,

taking users into idea creation process offers valuable insight into customers’

thoughts, wishes and preferences. (Antikainen et al., 2010).

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Studies yet from the 60’s show the significance of external resources in idea

creation processes (Freeman, 1991). Most idea creation happens when barriers of

different knowledge domains are crossed. (Leonard-Barton, 1995; Carlile, 2004)

Ideas are more likely to arise in teams that consist of people with different

personalities, knowledge, skills and backgrounds (Vyakarnam et al., 1997). Idea

creation marketplaces can act as mediators between mentioned actors (Antikainen

et al., 2010).

The concept of outside innovation also fits perfectly in this context. According to

Seybold (2006), the outside innovation happens when customers “lead the design of

your business processes, products, services, and business models”. Customers co-

design companies’ products and the whole business attracting other customers to

build a customer-centric ecosystem around company’s products and services.

(Seybold, 2006)

Rothwell’s (1994) model describes five generations of innovation processes, which

illustrates the evolution of the innovation process over time. The model starts from

Technology Push in the 1950’s/1960’s that emphasized R&D, continues with

Market Pull in the 1970s, followed by the “Coupling” model of Innovation that

combines R&D and marketing, again followed by the “Interactive” model in the

1980’s/1990’s that combines push and pull, and finally ends with “Network” model

in the 2000’s, which is the most essential here. (Rothwell, 1994)

Cyclic Innovation Model (CIM) by Berkhout and Hartmann (2006) is one of the

fourth-generation innovation models (4Gs) (Berkhout & Hartmann, 2006;

Chesbrough, 2003). In general, 4G models have the following characters (Berkhout

& Hartmann, 2006):

1. Innovation is embedded in partnerships: ‘open innovation’.

2. Attention is given to an early interaction between science and business.

3. Hard knowledge of emerging technologies is complemented by soft

knowledge of emerging markets.

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4. The need for new organizational concepts is acknowledged by emphasizing

skills for managing networks with specialized suppliers as well as early

users.

5. Entrepreneurship plays a central role.

CIM also follows this pattern as its four components are technological research,

product development, market transitions and scientific exploration. However, what

is special in CIM is that it describes a circle instead of chain as its components

influence each other and are influenced by each other. Figure 3 demonstrates this:

Figure 3 Cyclic Innovation Model (CIM) (Berkhout & Hartmann, 2006)

Innovation may start anytime, from any point of the circle. New technologies and

changes in the market influence each other continuously turning scientific

knowledge into socioeconomic value. (Berkhout & Hartmann, 2006)

The main message of CIM is the increased level of interaction of different

stakeholders, which make innovation process more dynamic and enables

organizations to start quickly, adjust quickly and learn quickly. This model

emphasizes the importance of continuous interaction between the internal sub-

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processes of the whole innovation process but also between these sub-processes

and their environment. (Berkhout & Hartmann, 2006)

Rothwells’s fifth generation model (5G) (1994) introduces networking and system

integration model that is focused on becoming a fast innovator by integrating

closer with stakeholders using technology and parallel information processing as

well as being flexible. The first of its main characters is a greater overall

organizational and systems integration that includes external networking with

suppliers and leading-edge users. This practically means a cross-functional

development process using horizontal technological collaboration. Second, 5G is

featured by flatter and more flexible organizational structure, which enables rapid

and effective decision making. This can be achieved, e.g., by empowering managers

at lower levels. Third character of 5G is fully developed internal databases, such as

data sharing systems, product development metrics and 3D-CAD systems. Finally,

the last feature of 5G is effective external electronic linkages, which includes co-

development with suppliers using linked CAD systems. (Rothwell, 1994) All in all, it

can be said that Rothewell’s model is build on the top of fourth-generation

innovation model, such as CIM, but it additionally includes a strong ICT point of

view in each of its features.

Various innovation models have been developed over recent years by several

authors (Desouza et al., 2009; Dobni, 2006). In the following, the most relevant

innovation process model for this study is presented.

2.2.1 Open Innovation Paradigm

Open Innovation is a paradigm by Henry Chesbrough (2003) proposing that, in

addition to internal ideas and paths to market, firms should use externals when

advancing their technology but internal mechanism to concretize the value.

However, internal ideas can be taken to new markets using external channels to

create additional value. These ideas can even seep out of the firm, often by

departing employees, external licensing or start-up companies that are partially

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staffed with company’s own employees. Naturally ideas can move also outside in

(Figure 4). (Chesbrough, 2003)

The characteristics of this model include utilizing ideas that are worthless to the

company, but have value in new markets, outside of the company. This way new

ideas that don’t have resources to be implemented internally will get a change to

realize. Fundamentally, this approach is based on abundant knowledge, which

company uncovers in its R&D, and which must be used readily. (Chesbrough, 2003)

Figure 4 Open Innovation Paradigm (Chesbrough, 2003)

The following chapter introduces one approach on Open Innovation.

2.3 Crowdsourcing in idea creation

When crowdsourcing, the company looks for an idea, a solution to a problem or

evaluation from a crowd (Bonabeau, 2009). The best solution will often be

rewarded. The collective intelligence of the crowd and its background diversity

may offer companies innovative ideas for a low cost. (Ribiere & Tuggle, 2010)

Crowdsourcing has successfully been applied in the area of forecasting. Surowiecki

(2004) suggests that ordinary people without any special knowledge can predict

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the future more accurately than experts due to the diversity of opinions and more

independent thinking. For example, employees have been proven to forecast

product demand more correctly than product managers of the same firm (Nocera,

2006). A study by Kaufman-Scarborought et al. (2010) argues that consumer input

increases companies' ability to predict the profitability of items sold in stores,

which easily and inexpensively enhances retailers' performance and profitability.

Porta et al. (2008) claims that already 50 percent of large enterprises and 47

percent of startups are using network intelligence for value creation. By network

intelligence, they refer to business intelligence of the Internet, i.e., freely available

information on customers, markets, competitors and other concerns for a business.

Furthermore, 55 percent of large enterprises and 45 percent of startups are using

their customers as a source of network intelligence. However, they remind that the

right mindset, processes and tools are needed to be able to use the collective

wisdom of masses. For instance, Nintendo has launched a community platform for

its customers, where they can give customer insight to products. In return,

participators get incentives, such as exclusive game reviews. Nintendo’s approach

leads to better product quality and brand experience as well as richer user

interface with lowered costs. (Porta et al., 2008)

According to Porta et al (2008), especially large enterprises should forget

perfection and concentrate on speed. This could be done innovating “quick and

dirty”, that is based on "failing fast and failing cheap" of "launch and adapt"

principles. (Porta et al., 2008)

2.4 Summary of findings

Chapter 2.2 summarized the recent requirements of companies, including the

emphasized meaning of innovations, committing end-users in early phases of the

product development process, openness and cooperation across different fields.

The Cyclic Innovation Model added that innovation may start anytime, anywhere,

and it requires continuous interactions as well as entrepreneurship. The fifth-

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generation model reminded about advantages of flat organizations and

empowerment of employees as well as horizontal technical collaboration.

Sub-chapter 2.2.1 presented one innovation process model that matched with these

requirements, Open Innovation paradigm, which responded to all the needs

mentioned in the previous chapter. It emphasized the role of innovations, was open

for sharing ideas and was based on cooperation with both customers and

companies from other knowledge domains.

The combination of these models would be a network of actors, which is highly

interactive and entrepreneurial and connected via advanced technical solution.

Single organizations in the network are flat and employees empowered. Actors are

not jealous for their ideas, but instead sharing them openly and giving ideas for the

direction that best implements them. Innovations may arise from any point of the

network, anytime, due to the democratized roles of individuals. R&D and business

are developed hand in hand, utilizing each other’s results and resources.

The last chapter, chapter 2.3, proposed one particular approach in idea creation –

crowdsourcing, which could be utilized to implement the described idea

marketplace. Crowdsourcing would outsource the idea creation to an undefined or

dedicated crowd, which could consist of all mentioned actors from customers to

developers and partners, using technical platform.

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3. Motivation to use online communities

Complicated innovation models are useless, if no consumers appear to an idea

marketplace. This can be avoided by understanding what would motivate people to

use social media, and finally, create ideas. A common way to discuss motivation is

to divide it into intrinsic and extrinsic motivations or motivators and hygiene

factors. These motivation theories have traditionally been associated with work

(Herzberg et al., 1959; Kressler, 2003), but similar motivations apply to knowledge

work as well, as can be seen in chapter 3.3.

3.1 Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

By intrinsic motivation, researchers mean the non-drive-based motivation which

“is based in the organismic needs to be competent and self-determining” and where

“the energy is intrinsic to the nature of the organism” (Deci & Ryan, 1985). In other

words, intrinsic motivation refers to “doing something because it is inherently

interesting or enjoyable”, whereas extrinsic motivation means “doing something

because it leads to a separable outcome” (Ryan and Deci, 2000). A separable

outcome is something external to the individual, such as financial compensation

(van Eeghen, 2008).

According to several studies, creativity results from risk-taking, uninhibited

exploration, and combination of old elements into new patterns (Amabile et al.,

1986). These studies (Amabile et al., 1986) propose that the intrinsic motivation

enhances creativity, whereas extrinsic motivation undermines motivation

(Amabile, 1983). McGraw (1978) suggested that extrinsic motivation improves

performance on algorithmic, simple and straightforward tasks, but inhibits

performance on heuristic tasks. Creativity tasks are basically heuristic, so they

should not be motivated extrinsically. A number of experimental studies have

shown the negative effects of extrinsic motivation on creativity. (Amabile et al.,

1986) These studies have included expected evaluation (Amabile, 1979) and

surveillance (Amabile et al., 1983).

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Thus, extrinsic motivating should be avoided in creative tasks. There are also ways

how intrinsic motivation can be turned into extrinsic motivation, which should be

avoided equally. First, a reward can be offered for a task that is already intrinsically

interesting for the person, but which becomes extrinsic and to be accomplished

only to obtain the reward. Second, the task can be used as a tool to end in some

other way than the offer of reward. Third, the task can be presented as work

instead of play. The explanation to the latter is that people react negatively to a

work when their behavior is controlled, because they have learned that work is

usually something that someone must be persuaded to do. Then again, if no salient

external constraints are performed on task engagement, they might react positively

to the same task. (Amabile et al., 1986)

In all of these explanations people must perform their tasks primarily as a means to

achieve the extrinsic end, that is, a reward. Achievement of the reward must

depend on doing the task. On the other hand, although task contingent rewards do

undermine intrinsic motivation, non-contingent rewards do not. (Amabile et al.,

1986) If rewards are presented randomly after task completion or as arbitrary

bonuses, they don’t have the negative effect (Ryan, Mims, & Koestner, 1983).

3.2 Two factor theory of motivation

Another – even older – way to discuss motivations is to divide them into motivators

and hygiene factors (Herzberg et al., 1959) where motivations are related to

intrinsic motivations whereas hygiene factors are related to extrinsic motivations

(Kressler, 2003). The difference here hides in the perspective from which

motivations are discussed. When intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are discussed

around creativity, motivators and hygiene factors refer to satisfaction: hygiene

factors cannot create satisfaction but their absence can cause dissatisfaction. Then

again, motivators can create satisfaction. (Herzberg et al., 1959)

Herzberg et al. (1959) have suggested that motivators include trust, independence,

career development, responsibility, sense of making a worthwhile contribution,

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achievement, being challenged, and recognition by colleagues, peers, superiors, the

work itself. The second group, hygiene factors, comprises pay, company policy and

administration, personal relations, status, security and – interestingly – processes

of proposing and approving ideas. (Herzberg et al., 1959)

What is more, Hertzberg et al. (1959) pointed out an important notion – hygiene

factors are also needed. They cannot create satisfaction, but when lacking, they

create dissatisfaction. Therefore extrinsic motivators are needed to avoid

dissatisfaction, but the real satisfaction, and motivations, must be created above

that with motivators. (Hertzberg et al., 1959) According to Kressler’s (2003)

interpretation, a lack of motivators is far more serious than only being dissatisfied

with some extrinsic factors.

3.3 Motivations to use online communities

Several studies have been made on motivation in online communities. Selected

studies of online communities, which are related to idea marketplaces from

different angles, will be introduced as follows, classified under extrinsic and

intrinsic factors.

3.3.1 Extrinsic motivations in online communities

Predictably, reward and recognition in their different forms are mentioned in

several studies. Classic social studies generally suggest that monetary rewards are

harmful to idea creation (Spence, 1956; Amabile et al., 1986; Toubia, 2006) but

they were found to be useful in innovation intermediaries, that is, in vendor

offering innovation platforms, where the strong relation between the company and

the users is lacking (Antikainen and Väätäjä, 2008a, b).

However, a study by Lakhani & Wolf (2005) claimed that creativity of programmers

did not suffer from paying, but was equally high than non-paid programmers’

creativity in Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) Projects. The motivation to

participate was even higher (over two days a week) among paid programmers than

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among volunteers (over one day a week) when measured the time spend on

programming. However, the study found that being paid was not the strongest

motivator, but the feeling of creativity and getting into a flow state. (Lakhani & Wolf

2005) Thus, monetary reward perhaps enables spending twice as much time on

programming, but the source of creativity hides in other motivators, both extrinsic

and intrinsic. These intrinsic motivators are discussed in the next chapter, and the

reward issue will be studied in more detail in chapter 3.3.3.

The same study (Lakhani & Wolf, 2005) mentioned yet two important extrinsic

motivators more that are consciously improving programming skills and “a sense

of obligation to give something back to the community in return for the software

tools it provides”, which belongs under reciprocity in Table 1. Professional status

and developing a program for work-related needs were also important for

contributors who were paid. Volunteers were participating to improve their skills

or they needed the software for non -work purposes. (Lakhani & Wolf 2005)

Lerner and Tirole (2002) studied F/OSS communities as well and they found out

that programmers contributed as long as the benefits exceed the costs. Benefits

included the already mentioned normal pay and getting access to the software

under development (von Hippel 2001). Especially lead users, users who identify

general needs months or years before the bulk of a marketplace, were motivated to

develop solutions for their own needs (von Hippel 1988). Delayed benefits of

developing software included career advancement (Holmström, 1999) and

improving programming skills. (Lakhani & Wolf 2005)

According to Jeppesen and Frederiksen (2006), members of company-hosted

online communities appreciate company recognition even higher than other peers’

recognition, because these innovative, advanced users want to identify themselves

with company developers instead of their peers. They also suggest that recognition

by peers will be achieved as a consequence of firm recognition. (Jeppesen and

Frederiksen 2006)

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Antikainen et al. (2010) added security, as well as open and constructive

atmosphere, to the list of motivations (Table 1). According to them, positive

atmosphere helps “enhancing motivation”, which describes its role as a hygiene

factor, instead of motivator or motivation.

3.3.2 Intrinsic motivations in online communities

A study made by Wasko and Faraj (2000) pointed out that the most popular reason

to participate in online communities was to give back to the community in return to

help. Other motivations were a feeling of having an effect on one’s environment

(Bandura, 1995) or other people, getting a support to participators’ self-images as

efficient people (Antikainen et al., 2010) and, undoubtedly, reputation (Hargadon

and Bechky, 2006; Kollock, 1999):

Creating reputation in open source software communities is already a common

way to convince employers and to be hired (Antikainen et al., 2010).

Antikainen et al. (2010) made their own study on motivations as well. They

discovered that, in addition to the mentioned factors, synergy and fusion of ideas

was one reason to use online communities. Furthermore, mentioned motivations

were finding similar people, sharing risk, and simply for fun or fame. The fun can be

found in excitement of using the system, its challenging or social interaction.

Finally, seeing own ideas developed further motivated users, as did positive and

constructive atmosphere. (Antikainen et al., 2010) According to a study by

Imaginatik Research (n.d.), idea submitters do not always even want to own their

ideas. 90 percent of ideas are not related to the field of the submitters’ own

expertise, which has lead Imaginatik Research to the conclusion that ideas are not

wanted to be owned because submitters do not have a chance to execute their ideas

themselves in any case. (Imaginatik plc, n.d.)

Another study (Davenport, 2005) revealed that employees prefer communication

channels that let them generate visible information instead of fragmented content

in social media. Employees think that they are “paid to produce, not to browse the

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intranet” (Davenport, 2005), so this kind of behavior makes sense for them. Thus,

employees should be trained on advantages of using social media platforms.

3.3.3 Reward and creativity

Since Skinnerian position (Skinner, 1938), the reinforcement theory has dominated

the field of behavioral science. According to Skinner, the likelihood of rewarded

behavior will increase. But since the 1970’s, researchers have began to question the

basic assumption of the reinforcement theory. Instead, intrinsic motivation

theorists suggest that reward can weaken certain wanted behavior under some

conditions (e.g., Deci, 1971; Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973; McGraw, 1978). These

studies explain the behavior with over-justification effect: If one gets a reward for

enjoyable behavior, the behavior will probably not be performed without reward

anymore, no matter how enjoyable it has been (e.g., Deci, 1971; Lepper et al., 1973).

Although reinforcement theorists (e.g., Feingold & Mahoney, 1975; Reiss &

Sushinsky, 1975) have tried to question these conclusions, the effect of expected

external reward on decreased intrinsic motivation has been empirically well-

documented. (Amabile et al., 1986)

For instance, Duncker’s (1945) famous candle experiment showed that test

subjects who were promised 20 dollars for the fastest solution solved the problem

significantly slower that those who were not promised a reward. In another study

(Kruglanski, Friedman, & Zeevi, 1971), test subjects who were promised a reward

for participation performed considerably worse than non-rewarded ones. They

were not as willing to volunteer for further participation either and they did not

seem to enjoy of the activity as much as their non-rewarded colleagues. (Amabile et

al., 1986)

In general, rewarded test subjects focus more narrowly on achieving the extrinsic

goal, they have more difficulties in solving the problem, and their work is

subjectively less creative. In Amabile et al. (1986), the rewards were not just

money but also some other tempting incentives, such as taking pictures with an

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instant camera. Both verbal and artistic tasks were tested. (Amabile et al., 1986)

Toubia (2006) offers an explanation for this behavior. According to him, rewards

do increase all response tendencies, but in complex tasks errors are more likely to

occur, and when rewarded, also errors will occur more (Toubia, 2006). Zajonc

(1965) proposes that rewards also enhance the performance of dominant, well-

learned responses but undermine new responses. Similarly, McCullers (1978)

believes in the enhancing effect of incentives when simple, routine, unchanging

responses are in question, but the situation is far more complex when tasks require

creativity.

However, it needs to be noted that in one presented study of Amabile et al. (1986),

test objects were from 5 to 10 years old undergraduate women, and hence the test

results cannot necessarily be generalized to the whole population. Study 3 of the

same article (Amabile et al., 1986) tested also adults but showed only weak support

for the correlations between reward and creativity. In addition, all studies expect

Toubia’s (2006) research were over 20 years old.

3.4 Summary of motivations

The presented literature has identified some factors that motivate users to

participate in online communities. These motivations are summarized in Table 1.

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Table 1 Users' motivations to participate in online communities (Antikainen

et al., 2010) [modified]

Motivations to participate in online communities Authors

Altruism Zeityln (2003) Care for community and attachment for the group Kollock (1999) Enjoyment and fun

von Hippel and von Krogh (2003), Nov (2007); Torvalds and Diamond (2001); Antikainen et al. (2010)

Firm recognition Jeppesen and Frederiksen (2006)

Ideology Nov (2007) Influencing and making better products/services Antikainen et al. (2010) Interesting objectives and intellectual stimulations Ridings and Gefen (2004); Wasko and Faraj (2000); Antikainen et al. (2010) Knowledge exchange, personal learning and social capital

Antikainen (2007), Gruen et al. (2005), von Hippel and von Krogh (2003), Wasko and Faraj (2000); Wiertz and Ruyter (2007)

Needs, software improvements and technical reasons Riding and Gefen (2004), Jeppesen and Frederiksen (2006); Kollock (1999)

New viewpoints and synergy Antikainen et al. (2010)

Peer recognition Lerner and Tirole (2002); Hargadon and Bechky (2006)

Recreation Ridings and Gefen (2004)

Sense of cooperation Antikainen et al. (2010)

Sense of community and similarity Antikainen et al. (2010)

Sense of efficacy, influencing Bandura (1995), Constant et al. (1994); Kollock (1999); Antikainen et al. (2010) Winning, competition and rewards from participation Antikainen et al. (2010)

Clear purpose and goals Antikainen et al. (2010) Friendships, relationships and social support Hagel and Armstrong (1997), Rheingold (1993); Ridings and Gefen (2004)

Monetary rewards Antikainen and Väätäjä (2008a, b); Wasko and Faraj (2000)

Open and constructive atmosphere Antikainen et al. (2010)

Reciprocity Kollock (1999); Wasko and Faraj (2000) Reputation and enhancement of professional status

Bagozzi and Dholakia (2002), Hargadon and Bechky (2006), Lakhani and Wolf (2005), Lerner and Tirole (2002); Wasko and Faraj (2000)

Sense of obligation to contribute Bryant et al. (2005); Lakhani and Wolf (2005) Winning, competition and rewards from participation Antikainen et al. (2010)

Idea marketplaces need both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as well as hygienic

factors and motivators. An idea creation work itself is obviously creative from its

nature and needs intrinsic factors to be realized. On the other hand, not all work

done in idea marketplaces is creative – a user may get an idea beforehand when

being in a creative stage and just needs motivation to share the idea later on in an

idea marketplace. Furthermore, simply sharing plain ideas is not enough. Ideas

need to be developed further by making demos, prototypes and business plans, as

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well as rated by voting and commenting. These tasks are simple and

straightforward and thus motivated by extrinsic motivations or hygiene factors.

The two factor theory of motivation supports dividing motivators into two

categories. E.g. monetary rewards among other hygienic factors are needed to

enable certain level of time consumption, or to gain attention, but the real

motivation comes from other factors, like flow state and self-fulfillment. Figure 5

illustrates motivations listed in Table 1 categorized under extrinsic and intrinsic

motivations as well as hygiene factors and motivators.

Figure 5 Extrinsic and intrinsic motivations as well as motivators and hygiene

factors displayed as subsets

However, knowing long lists of motivators does not help when specific groups are

targeted. Everything cannot be promised to everyone and anything does not

motivate anyone. Thus, it is important to clarify what kind of motivations motivate

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certain types of people who are wanted in an idea marketplace. Moreover,

motivations to work and motivations to act in general online communities must be

taken to the context of idea creation environment and test if they still apply.

At first, however, we need to find out what kind of people, or roles, are needed in

online communities.

4. Roles of users in online communities

Participation is one of the basic actions of online communities. Engagement in the

social, technical and cultural practice of the community helps to create expertise as

knowledge is generated socially. (Toral et al., 2009)

Different roles occur inside of online communities. Users start as newcomers, who

create their own “learning curriculum” by performing small and easy tasks with

others. Gradually they will gain expertise and undertake more important roles.

(Toral et al., 2009)

A research by Toral et al. (2009) proposes that the success of online communities

can be derived from three factors, which are network cohesion, core of the

community, and network structure. Roles play critical role in the model of Toral et

al. (2009). Network cohesion is related to roles so that cohesive networks facilitate

a good reputation, thus attracting new members to join the community. Community

success, in turn, depends on the level of activities, number of developers and team

effectiveness (Preece, 2001; Crowston et al., 2003).

Roles are especially important to attract more people to the service, as online

communities need to have a critical mass of users to attract new users. The size of

critical mass depends on the ratio between active and passive users, of which 45-90

percent can expect to be passive users. (Toral et al., 2009)

“Successful innovation involves multiple players – a team (not just a person) of idea

generators, a team of designers, a team of developers, and a set of prospective

users. The tasks involved include assembling teams of like-minded individuals

willing to work in team settings.” (Ribiere & Tuggle, 2010)

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As Ribiere & Tuggle (2010) puts it, idea creation process requires different kind of

players. These players can include several roles, which are often defined as sets of

activities performed by individuals (Goffman, 1959; Corsini, 2002).

Roles can be understood and classified from several angles. In computer sciences,

roles are often characterized by access rights, whereas the organization theory

categorizes users into formal roles, such as moderator, or informal roles, such as

leader (Cothrel and Williams, 1999b). Roles can also be classified using four

“expressive characteristics”, which are position, function/tasks, behavior-

expectations and social interaction (Herrmann et al., 2004). In Herrmann’s model,

the social system addresses the role to an actor. The role is always linked to a

position, which again implies certain functions and tasks. (Herrmann et al., 2004)

In online communities, roles often include some implicit expectations such as

informal agreement and commitment, and roles are usually the result of a

negotiation between an actor and other users of the community. However,

especially in online communities there are also informal roles. In a virtual

environment, official roles are usually not assigned in at all, but they are informal

and interchangeable. For instance, an actor may play both advisor and advisee roles

simultaneously. (Tang & Yang, 2006)

For designers of online communities it is important to understand what kind of

roles are needed to be able to build a working community, but according to Lin et

al. (2007), group members should as well recognize their functional roles, and thus

behaviors, to perform well in knowledge-related activities and creation. Therefore,

recognizing the online roles and their behaviors should clarify how online learning

communities work and what kind of online communities best benefit learners.

(Tang & Yang, 2006)

The following sub-chapters introduce five different ways to categorize roles in

online communities. Introduced communities are not actual online innovation

communities because such studies were not found. However, it can be interpreted

that innovation communities are related to all of the studied communities, as open

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innovation includes characteristics from all of followings: open source, learning,

branding, guilds (as teams), and technology. Leaders were also studied, as leader

roles might be relevant too.

The last chapter synthesizes roles categorizing them in a new way.

4.1 Roles of users in online communities around open source software projects

According to Barcellini et al. (2008), some participants of open source software

(OSS) design communities have formally assigned roles, such as administrators or

managers. Some studies of design contexts (Sonnenwald, 1996) and online

interactions (Cassell et al., 2005) suggest that emerging roles also occur, but they

may be dependent upon user’s formal status. Status defines what is expected from

a certain user and can thus have an effect on the behavior (Barcellini et al., 2008).

On the other hand, roles are dependent purely on user’s actions in the community,

which indicates the emerging behavior of participants (Barcellini et al., 2008). For

instance, a study on an online community by Cassell et al. (2005) have emphasized

how users actively construct their positions and roles. These roles reflect the

number and content of the posted messages. Maloney-Krichnar and Preece (2002)

show that users create a mental model of the roles in the community, which forms

the basis of their involvement and participation.

In an OSS project, where the collaboration is based on discussion forums, roles also

emerge from interactions between users in the discussion space (Mahendran,

2002), or in other cases, from interaction between users and mailing lists. For

example, “Bot”, short for robot, is the nickname for one role, which emerges from

replying quickly in mailing lists. Irrespective of the means of collaboration, roles

emerge and are actively constructed in OSS projects. (Barcellini et al., 2008) Roles

can be changed through a peer-review mechanism by proving value to the project

and thus gaining respect (Ducheneaut, 2005; Mahendran, 2002; Jensen and Scacchi,

2005).

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To conclude, roles in OSS communities are the result of a combination of users’

contributions to the online discussions, project’s organizational structure, and

technical skills and activities exhibited by users (Barcellini et al., 2008). Based on

this, the research by Barcellini et al. (2008) has identified the following roles in OSS

communities: the project leader, the administrators of the project, the developers and

the champion of the PEP. PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal, which is a

term for improvements to the Python language used in the researched OSS

discussion space. (Barcellini et al., 2008)

Barcellini et al. (2008) describe a set of behaviors of the defined roles as follows.

The project leader and the champion of the PEP are frequent contributors in all the

discussion and their posts lead to multiple branches. The project leader is often

quoting multiple messages, closing discussions and making decisions. The

champion writes syntheses of previously posted messages, which is natural for the

champion’s role as the champion is the one who proposed the PEP and is thus in

charge of the PEP discussion. The project leader guarantees the project, which

confirms Mahendran’s suggestion (2002) about the project leader’s authority over

the community. Administrators tend to post in the beginning of the branching

positions, which leads to quotations in multiple messages; in linear sequences of

exchanges with developers and in closing positions, which ends the conversation

when the project leader has already stopped participating in the discussion. In the

end of the discussion, administrators only participate in meta-theme discussion.

Barcellini et al. (2008) suggest that the project leader and the administrators have

complementary roles that are occupied alternately, and the administrator relies on

the project leader in Python language specific themes. The administrator only

replaces the project manager when he does not want or cannot participate in the

discussion anymore. Developers are posting in the beginning of the conversation

with deep quotations and in linear sequences of exchanges with administrators and

others developers. Developers participate especially in the design process as their

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messages contain design alternatives and they can start branching structures in the

discussions. (Barcellini et al., 2008)

All in all, the project leader and the administrator are on the top of the conversation

hierarchy but developers are enhancing the design process by proposing new

solutions and evaluating others’ solutions. However, developers need to participate

in the right time to avoid getting punished by the projects leader. (Barcellini et al.,

2008)

4.2 Roles of users in online learning communities

Lin et al. (2007) studied products and processes of knowledge sharing and creating

in professional online communities and classified them into inferior and superior

types. Inferior roles of members include information/opinion seekers or givers,

encouragers, and followers, whereas superior group roles include initiators,

orienters, encouragers, recorders, gatekeepers, information/opinion seekers or givers,

coordinators, and clowns. The inferior group consists primarily of idea providers

whereas the superior group consists of task performers, idea providers and

integrators. (Lin et al., 2007)

Lin et al. (2007) discovered that only few participants in the inferior group

habitually cooperated when more than half of participants in the superior group

did so. They also pointed out that the superior group was more enthusiastic about

sharing knowledge than the inferior group. Moreover, Lin et al. (2007) found that

group members are aware of their functional roles, and each functional role

requires a set of behaviors to act during the knowledge sharing and creation

processes.

Based on the roles presented above by Lin et al. (2007), Yeh (2010) has identified

eight roles that occur in online learning communities. The analytical results by Yeh

(2010) demonstrate that roles can be composed of multiple behaviors or only one

behavior. The roles are supervisors, information providers, group instructors,

atmosphere constructors, opinion providers, reminders, trouble-makers and problem

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solvers. The name of the role describes the main functions of the role in questions,

and Table 2 shows the occurrence of each role in researched online leaning

communities. (Yeh, 2010)

Table 2 Occurrence of Roles in Online Lerning Communities (Yeh, 2010),

[modified]

Role Supervisors Information providers

Group instructors

Atmosphere constructors

Opinion providers Reminders

Trouble- makers

Problem solvers

Number 53 36 17 91 79 80 48 21

According to Yeh (2010), the most common roles in online learning communities

from within-group perspective are information providers, opinion providers, and

trouble-makers. The difference between information providers and opinion

providers is, as the name describes, that information providers provide fact-based

objective information, while opinion providers provide subjective opinions related

to group work. The trouble-makers cause troubles by being absent from

discussions and not doing their part of the work. From an across-group

perspective, the most frequent roles are supervisors, positive atmosphere

constructors, reminders, problem solvers and – unfortunately again - trouble-

makers. As opposed to trouble-makers, supervisors are essential to well-working

communities since they suggest work-related improvements, take others’ opinions

into account, set schedules and assign tasks to other participants. Another role

critical to functioning of knowledge-based communities is group instructor which

is the least common role. Group instructors are able to solve misconceptions and

organize gathered information (Yeh, 2010), which naturally anyone cannot do

(Waltonen-Moore et al., 2006).

Similarly, Agre (1998) studied designers and noted the importance of one

additional role, that is, thought leader. Thought leaders are needed for building

trust within a community, foreseeing issues, gathering positions and arguments,

networking with relevant people, and articulating the issue to other community to

provoke thinking. (Agre, 1998)

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4.3. Roles of users in online brand communities

Fournier & Lee (2009) also note the importance of opinion leaders – or thought

leaders as named in chapter 4.2 – in social networks, but emphasize giving a chance

to everyone to play an equally valuable role. Fournier & Lee (2009) researched

brand communities including Red Hat Society, Trekkies, and MGB car blub. A brand

community refers to “a group of ardent consumers organized around the lifestyle,

activities, and ethos of the brand” (Fournier & Lee, 2009). Nowadays these

communities get together specifically online. (Fournier & Lee, 2009)

As a result of their study, Fournier & Lee (2009) identified 18 social and cultural

roles that are critical to brand community’s function, preservation and evolution.

These roles include, to name a few, greeters who welcome new members to the

community; celebrities who represent the community; storytellers who spread the

story of the community throughout the group; and heroes who act as role models

within the community. (Fournier & Lee, 2009) Opinion leaders and evangelists also

play important roles, since, according to Fournier & Lee (2009), they are the ones

who spread information, influence decisions, and help new ideas gain traction in

social networks.

Interestingly, Fournier & Lee (2009) claim that companies hosting online

communities are able not only to evaluate the existing roles and behaviors but also

to fill in the missing roles to improve community function. According to them,

community designers can create role structures and support systems to a wide

range of roles. Previous studies (e.g. Sonnenwald, 1996) have already noted that

roles can change and emerge, but being able to control roles is something new.

According to Fournier and Lee (2009), this can be done by giving “members

opportunities to take on new roles, alternate between roles, and negotiate tensions

across roles in conflict – without ever leaving the fold”. They provide a successful

example of such action from Saddleback Church of Orange County, which maintains

a cohesive community of more than 20,000 members by regularly monitoring

participants’ needs, and “creating subgroups and roles to keep people engaged”.

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Groups are organized for instance by age, gender, and interests, as well as by

shared challenges, social commitments, and family situations. People are offered

several different roles simultaneously, and they can participate via different

channels. (Fournier & Lee, 2009)

4.4 Roles of users in a guild community

Ang & Zaphiris (2010) identified three social roles of a guild community, an online

community with explicitly pronounced role-play element, in a popular computer

game, World of Warcraft (WoW). The roles were densely connected core members,

loosely connected semi-periphery members, and an outer ring of disconnected

periphery players. These three blocks illustrated distinct levels of participation as

well as sense of belongingness to the community. (Ang & Zaphiris, 2010)

Ang & Zaphiris (2010) described core members as being highly connected within

their own block and moderately connected to other blocks. Presumably they had

been a part of the guild for a long time and knew each other well. They were active

in the game chat, managed the group and gave help, but, interestingly, did not ask

for help. (Ang & Zaphiris 2010) Like core members, semi-periphery members were

also giving help, but getting help as well. Apart from that, they were active in the

game chat and managing the group. Therefore, they were not in the core of the

guild but trying to get involved in the community. Members of periphery block

were instead merely seeking help from the guild but not involved in the community

otherwise. They had access to a lot of other players, and thus a great chance of

getting help, but they did not contribute to the community or give anything back.

(Ang & Zaphiris, 2010)

Ang & Zaphiris (2010) have found that interacting with other players encourages

players to move from the periphery to the core of the community, and especially,

giving help is a key action positioning a player in the network. However, not all

players have the ability to give help, but it depends on the player’s knowledge and

skills. Therefore, experienced players are the most likely ones to take the role in the

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core group. On the other hand, less-skilled players can make themselves more

knowledgeable by being active in the game chat, which does not always require

that advanced skills or knowledge. According to the study, some lower level players

were even categorized as core members due to their high activity in tasks such as

the game chat. Thus, Ang & Zaphiris (2010) classified the core members into two

groups, knowledge players and social players. Knowledge players provide help and

assist other players, which perhaps attracts more members into the guild. Then

again, social players nurture a friendly and welcoming atmosphere and thus attract

more members to join the guild. On the other hand, the analysis showed that some

higher level players were located also in the periphery, because their participation

mainly consisted of asking for help. These players are called freeloaders as they

only use the guild “as an instrumental tool for their task interaction”. In addition,

the periphery consists of newbies, who are new to the community in general. They

need help in basic community-related issues. What differentiates newbies from

freeloaders is that they might gradually move towards the core group of the guild

community as they gain more experience and skills and they also start giving help

to others. However, some of the newbies have been proved to turn into freeloaders,

which is an alternative path. (Ang & Zaphiris, 2010)

4.5 Roles of users in online technology communities

Rheingold (1993) has studied virtual communities which he defines as follows:

“social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on

those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of

personal relationships in cyberspace.“

When this definition is compared to the definition of online communities in chapter

1.1, online communities and virtual communities can be seen referring to the same

phenomenon. Thus, also a study by Madanmohan & Navelkar (2004) can also be

included in this research. They have studied one special part of online

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communities, virtual technology communities, which Tushman and Rosenkopf

(1992) define as

“virtual communities that share a common interest in a particular technology and

develop not only technological routines, but language and mannerisms.”

Madanmohan & Navelkar (2004) have studied roles in technology communities

through a life cycle, which starts from a newbie stage, when the person is new to

system and its workings. Newbie is followed by intermediate, which already has

“sufficient know-how to use a system and learn more”. The next phase is advanced

user, who is “capable of solving others’ problems” and “involved in propagation of the

virtues of system”. The final stage is an expert who says the last word in system

related issues and has “deep knowledge about the functioning as well as its

advocacy”.

Moreover, Madanmohan & Navelkar (2004) have identified formalized roles within

evolved technology community where newbies have turned to experts and found

their own styles to participate and interact with each other. These roles include

core organizers who acquire funding, heighten visibility and ensure participation of

key members for the success of the community. These users have also motivated

and encouraged other users as well as elicited involvement from them in earlier

stages. Thus they know everyone, and the role emerges among participants. The

organizer might also be responsible for the technology infrastructure, which makes

the organizer the dominant actor of the community (Butler, et al., 2002). In

addition, core organizers promote the community to others. (Madanmohan &

Navelkar, 2004)

Other identified roles include experts, who represent the knowledge of the

community, as they share tacit knowledge and arbitrate technical decisions when

the consensus is not found otherwise. Problem posers identify technical problems

for discussions and seek solutions. Implementers implement new suggestions and

validate them through experiments, which makes their role very critical for the

development of the community. Integrators organize existing information, codify

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rules, build taxonomies and perhaps take into use new tools and methodologies.

Philosophers preach about standards and they are helping to get the message out.

They might not be experts in technology but they understand how to use it.

(Madanmohan & Navelkar, 2004)

According to Madanmohan & Navelkar (2004), the most essential point to note

here is the openness of technology communities and the flexibility of roles.

4.6 Role of leader in online groups

Most online groups have a person who has taken a formal role of a leader, such as

owner, administrator, host, or wizard. The role can be needed for the high-level

administrator privileges on a server, or the online group misses a formal position of

administration as it is distributed from its nature. As in traditional organizations,

also the leader of an online group is formally named and has certain rights and

responsibilities. (Butler et al., 2002)

The role of the leader in online communities has different kind of tasks and

responsibilities as well as privileges. They might include adding and removing

members from the community or items from the archive. In moderated groups,

leaders might allow or reject posting, or rule these rights. They might also be

responsible for infrastructure management. The role identity should engage

leaders to be more active and provide more content than other members, limit

undesirable behavior as well as promote the community externally. All in all,

leaders should do more community building work than others. (Butler et al., 2002)

According to Butler (2002) the formal leader role in online communities has

originally been defined with special access privileges to technical tools and

network infrastructure, but recently technical responsibility has been going hand in

hand with social responsibility. Social responsibility includes activities such as

promoting the group, encouraging other members, moderating their behavior, and

posting messages. (Butler et al., 2002)

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Leaders are differentiated from other members exactly in technical and social

tasks, or in the level of activity in these tasks, to be precise. Leaders spend more

time on creating content and posting messages than reading messages. But also

other members spend time on community building work, not only formal leaders.

(Butler et al., 2002)

4.7 Summary

Recognizing roles of participants and their behaviors clarifies how online

communities work and what kind of online roles benefit communities best.

Therefore, chapter 4 presented five set of roles in different kind of online

communities.

Chapter 4.1 presented the roles of open source design communities and one

possible way to categorize roles in general. Roles in this chapter were categorized

using hierarchical positions in the community. One important point to be noted

here is that this chapter claimed roles being able to emerge but to be partially

dependent on user's formal status.

Chapter 4.2 studied roles in online learning communities. This chapter described

what kind of roles and behaviors differentiate superior communities from inferior

ones.

Chapter 4.3 identified 18 social and cultural roles in online brand communities,

which were more specific and human than the roles presented in other sub-

chapters of chapter 4. One particularly interesting notion in this chapter was that

companies hosting online communities are able to add missing roles to improve the

functionality of the community.

Chapter 4.4 divided roles in guild communities into three layers based on users'

level of participation and sense of belonginess. This division was actually a

description of user's life cycle from a newbie to a core player, but it also suggested

a division to knowledge players and social players.

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Chapter 4.5 presented a life cycle model of roles similar to chapter 4.4. According to

this model, openness and flexibility of roles are the most important features to

make an online technology community work effectively.

Finally, chapter 4.6 analyzed the various roles of a leader in online groups. In

addition to a formal status, leaders are differentiated from other members by the

time they spend on technical and social tasks.

Table 3 summarizes the identified roles grouped by their type instead of author.

Identified roles from chapters 4.1, 4.5 and 4.6 were hierarchical and chronological

from their nature. Chapters 4.2, 4.3 and 4.5 included information processing

related roles. Chapter 4.4 concentrated almost entirely on building an atmosphere.

Roles in chapters 4.2 consisted mainly of administrative roles, but also chapters 4.4

and 4.6 had some of them. Trouble makers from chapter 4.3 formed their own

category, which is of negative nature. And finally, chapter 4.4 mentioned one role

that most online communities most likely have, but which is often not brought up:

the passive audience.

Table 3 Roles of users in online communities identified from the literature

Role Description

hie

rarc

hic

al

Project manager Makes decisions; closes discussions; guarantees the community; on the top of the hierarchy

Administrator Maintains meta-level discussion; starts new branches; next in the hierarchy

Champion Opens new discussions; writes syntheses

Developer Proposes new solutions; evaluates other solutions; on the bottom of the hierarchy

Intermediate Has sufficient know-how to use a system and learn more

Advanced user Is capable of solving problems and involved in propagation of the virtues of system

Core Organizer Organizes the community, initiates talks and groups formations

Leader Technical administrator; formal administration: addsand removes users and data; rules posting rights; infrastructure management; promotes community; encourages other members

chro

no

logi

cal

Core member, knowledge player

Long-term member, highly connected, moderates, gives help, and assists; does not ask help

Core member, social player Long-term member, highly connected, moderates; active in chat; creates atmosphere

Semi-periphery member Seeks and gives help; active in chat; manages group;

Periphery member; freeloader

Gets help but does not want to be involved in the community; is just using the resources of the community

Periphery member; Newbie Gets help and wants to be involved in the community; is progressing and later helps others

New to system and its workings

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Enjoys learning and seeks self-improvement

info

rmat

ion

pro

cess

ing

Reminder Reminds others about the details for completing the work

information seeker Seeks information

Opinion seeker Seeks information or opinion from the group for individuals to make judgments

Mentor Teaches others and shares expertise

Expert Tacit knowledge, knowledge sharing

Information provider Provides and shares information

Problem solver Answers questions; corrects and explains problems by others

Group instructor Clarifies misconceptions

Opinion provider Provides opinions

Initiators Stimulates the group, and provides new ideas or thoughts

Problem poser Brings problems to the platform, poses queries

Implementer Establishes empirical validity to the suggestions made, Informs limitations and bugs

atm

osp

he

re

Encourager Accepts members’ options by praising, agreeing, or stimulating

Atmosphere constructor Constructs positive atmosphere

Partner Encourages, shares, and motivates

Clown Promotes free and easy atmosphere by something funny

Greeter Welcomes new members into the community

Catalyst Introduces members to new people and ideas

Back-Up Acts as a safety net for others when they try new things

Storyteller Spreads the community’s story throughout the group

Historian Preserves community memory; codifies rituals and rites

Hero Acts as a role model within the community

Celebrity Serves as a figurehead or icon of what the community represents

Provider Hosts and takes care of other members

Guide Helps new members navigate the culture

Performer Takes the spotlight

adm

inis

trat

ive

Follower Follows instructions to perform tasks when the group needs

Orienter Instructs the group correct goals and direction

Recorder Recording resolutions and plans

Gatekeeper Oversees and establishes the group norm, usually demonstrate themselves

Coordinator Integrates ideal and practicality, and avoid meandering

Supervisor Suggests work-related improvements; Requests others' opinions; sets discussion schedules and tasks to others

Ambassador Promotes the community to outsiders

Accountant Keeps track of people’s participation

Talent Scout Recruits new members

Decision Maker Makes choices affecting the community’s structure and function

Integrator Collates several rules/suggestions, builds taxonomy, builds manual

Philosopher Pushes for standardization, regulatory support

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ne

gati

ve

Trouble maker Causes problems by absenting from discussions and not finishing their work

aud

ien

ce

Supporter Participates passively as an audience for others

There is some overlapping of roles between models. Both Ang & Zaphiris (2010)

and Madanmohan & Navelkar (2004) propose “newbie” as one role. The enormous

number of different roles may be due to various natures of the studied online

communities. As the studied roles have not occurred in online idea creation

communities, it is still necessary to study if all these roles are really needed in idea

creation communities.

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5. Idea creation tools and functions in online communities

Numerous commercial idea crowdsourcing websites already exists, the most well-

known of which include IdeaStorm (Dell, 2010) by Dell, My Starbucks Idea

(Starbucks Corporation, 2010) by Starbucks, Refresh Everything (Pepsi Co, 2010)

by Pepsi, Designbyme (The LEGO Group, 2010) by Lego, Connect + Develop

(Procter & Gamble, 2010) by P&G and InnoCentive (InnoCentive, Inc., 2010).

In this study, idea crowdsourcing web sites refer to web sites that are concentrated

on idea crowdsourcing. Not much academic research has been done on idea

crowdsourcing websites. Instead, collaboration plays an important role in idea

crowdsourcing, as it basically means creating ideas in cooperation, and

collaboration tools have been studied broadly. Thus, this study presents selected

collaboration features in online communities in the first chapter. The following

chapter concerns knowledge-management systems. It is well-known that

knowledge catalyzes innovations, and therefore, knowledge management systems

can bring a great value to innovation processes. Sub-chapter 5.2.1 discusses briefly

knowledge-enabled innovation management systems (KIMS), which are relevant in

the context of this kind of idea crowdsourcing services, but, unfortunately, only a

few studies on KIMS were found. Chapter 5.3, in turn, identifies three alternative

approaches to open innovation. Chapter 5.4 concerns idea creation functions from

the innovation process point of view, while the last chapter, 5.5, briefly benchmarks

one interesting social media platform, Facebook.

5.1 Collaboration features in online communities

“To invoke user interest and collaboration, companies utilize certain design tools and

toolkits. Users interested in designing their own products want to do so efficiently.

Manufacturers can therefore attract them with kits of design tools that ease their

product-development tasks and with products that can serve as “platforms” upon

which to develop and realize user-developed modifications” (von Hippel, 2005, p.

128).

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According to different researches, certain tools are identified. Antikainen et al.

(2010) highlighted Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that provide

enthusiastic users an opportunity to realize themselves and develop community

further. Adaptation of tools, transparency of the status, and user profiles are

required features as well. Users should be able to see who is online doing what and

keep up-to-date on news. Some online communities offer particular tools even for

innovation. Functionalities, such as rating, refining of ideas, promoting,

commenting, suggesting and discussion are also relevant. (Antikainen et al., 2010).

However, Antikainen et al. (2010) remind that creating collaboration between

strangers is not easy. For example, scheduling, managing time, creating the sense of

real cooperation and people getting to know each other are challenges identified by

the research (Antikainen et al., 2010). Another challenge is rewarding. It is difficult

to reward groups instead of individuals. Moreover, some rewarding systems seem

to increase participation but not collaboration. Instead, ability to comment others’

ideas may be more motivating. (Antikainen et al., 2010)

As Antikainen et al. (2010) put it:

“Users should be able to feel like they are sitting around the same virtual table and

working together as a group.”

Search is also one fundamental feature in any information platform: users must be

able to find what they are looking for. This might sound obvious, but in the survey

made by Forrester, less than 50 percent of the respondents told that finding

information from intranets has been easy. On the other hand, 87 percent of the

respondents of another study by Pew Internet & American Life Project report

usually having successful search results. (McAfee, 2006)

Another search-kind-of mechanism that experienced users advocate is tags. They

help to categorize the content using users’ intelligence. Tags also tell other

employees which sites to visit. Recommendation algorithms are the next step to

this and suggest people similar pages (or ideas) they already like. (McAfee, 2006)

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According to McAfee (2006), people have a need to create and tell stories, that is, to

write for a broad audience. This partially explains the popularity of wikis and blogs.

And the most professional people should have something, such as insight,

knowledge or experience, to contribute. (McAfee, 2006)

Some social media ground rules include that all tools should be easy to use and

require no HTML skills or downloading additional software. Few clicks and a web

browser should be enough. On the other hand, the ground rules do not define how

the tools should be used or structured but the user should be able to use one’s own

creativity. (McAfee, 2006)

Table 4 Tools and methods for collaboration (Antikainen et al., 2010)

[modified]

Tools and methods for collaboration

Active participation of maintainers and good usability

Active participation of maintainers, rules, maintainers' personal information

Influencing others' opinions motivates to collaborate

Tools for idea generation, refining, commenting and rating

Tools for idea generation and time management

Usability of services

Rewarding equitably groups not individuals

Profiles and status information, scheduling and time management

5.2 Knowledge management systems

Knowledge management does not have any established definition (Alavi & Leidner,

2001), but it can be viewed as “a state of mind, as an object, as a process, a situation

of having access to information or even as a capacity” (Alavi & Leidner, 2001, p.

109). Knowledge management is becoming less top-down, centric and command-

and-control driven, and turning into more open, participative and social. Nowadays

KM includes even Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, videocasting, social

networks, RSS feed, IM and tagging. (Ribiere & Tuggle, 2010)

Compared to physical communities, online communication considerably decreases

the costs of interaction between users as well as firms and users (Jeppesen &

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Frederiksen, 2006). Online communities help firms to build brands (Muniz and

O'Guinn 2001), support use of firm’s products (Moon and Sproull, 2001), get ideas

and feedback (Williams and Cothrel, 2000), and to charge customers for accessing

to communities (Armstrong and Hagel, 1996). An especially important outcome of

them is more flexible production processes, which enable firms to respond to new

information throughout the development cycle resulting in products that better

meet customer need and thus perform better (Iansiti and MacCormack 1997,

MacCormack et al., 2001).

Ribiere and Tuggle (2010) are imaging a two-way flow of knowledge, where

innovators give prototypes in the hands of end users, who will give feedback about

them and even refine them. This can be brought even further by giving customers a

whole toolkit that they can use to build prototypes themselves thus becoming

Innovators as well. (Ribiere & Tuggle, 2010)

KM tools should allow end users to offer their opinions, suggest for improvements

and observations. (Ribiere & Tuggle, 2010)

5.2.1 Knowledge-enabled innovation management systems

Ribiere and Tuggle (2010) represent their vision of knowledge-enabled innovation

management system (KIMS), which integrates customers, communities, the crowd,

as well as optionally outsourcing companies and spin-off ventures to the one

innovation ecosystem. Outside the ecosystem layer, there is an innovation zone

that is acting as space for actors of ecosystem to cooperatively develop ideas

(Figure 6). This zone is often supported with a technological system that includes

several elements to enable the interaction. Ribiere and Tuggle (2010) have listed

some of them, as presented in Table 5.

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Table 5 Examples of actions enabling the interactivity between the customers

and the crowd with the internal innovation process (Ribiere and Tuggle,

2010)

Submit idea (new product, new feature, new process, problem solving,...)

Comment on idea, products, features, strategy...

Evaluate, rank, assess, judge, test

Experience (simulation, virtual reality) and experiment

Share (multimedia documents)

Communicate, discuss and interact with others (internal and external actors of the innovation process)

Compare

Learn and share knowledge and expertise

Entertain themselves and play

Make money and get recognition

Advise/recommend

Design, build, test their own prototypes

Ask for assistance

Complain

The third layer of KIMS turns chaotic environment of raw ideas and multiple actors

to a “learning and fruitful creativity environment”. KM system is heavily helping

doing that by capturing, organizing, storing and sharing all the knowledge from

innovation zone. It is also acting as a marketplace for selling and buying ideas, and

satisfying the need of society. (Ribiere and Tuggle, 2010)

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Figure 6 Framework of a knowledge-enabled innovation management system

(KIMS) supported by KM 2.0 technologies (Ribiere and Tuggle, 2010)

5.3 Social media tools and technologies

A few studies review the tools that are used to manage open innovation. Elmquist

et al. (2009) classify these tools into aggregating, liberating and allowing types.

The first type, aggregating, refers to aggregating information from different sources

to meet the needs of the company. Procter & Gamble uses this approach in their

idea creation website called “Connect & Develop”. It is used to adapt the initiatives

that come from outside the home department or entirely outside the company.

(Elmquist et al., 2009) The website is based on a general technique also called

“Connect and develop”, which leverages the distributed innovative capacity using

the interfaces of large organizations towards their multinational stakeholders to

find ideas (Dodgson et al., 2006; Huston and Sakkab, 2006, 2007). Tao and

Magnotta (2006) provide a similar example called “Identify and accelerate”.

Accordingly, this process identifies the needs of the organization and utilizes the

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interface towards the external stakeholders to find solutions to those needs (Tao &

Magnotta 2006). These processes are based on standard open source methods as

well as tools commonly used for innovation (Piller and Walcher, 2006).

The second type, liberating, by Piller and Walcher (2006), claims that customers

have “sticky knowledge” which can be released in idea competitions but not in

standard market research.

The third type, allowing, proposes extreme programming (XP) to open the

innovation process to external sources (Gassmann et al., 2006), which are often not

utilized in the possible extent. Extreme programming would help to change

behavior and culture, which need to be changed at first to change anything else.

Implementation of XP process needs the support of the leadership and senior

executives, and the roles, responsibilities and relationships of the people and

processes must be aligned. (Elmquist et al., 2009) The involvement of the

leadership is also crucial.

Enkel et al. (2005) provides a new angle to the topic by suggesting five negative

sides of customer involvement in the idea creation process. The main risks include

loosing the know-how, the dependence on customers’ views and customers’

personality, the potential limitations to mere incremental, limiting only to a niche

market and potentially misunderstanding customers. (Enkel et al., 2005)

5.4 Functions in different phases of the idea creation process

Preez & Louw (2008) have generated a new innovation model called the Fugle,

which was developed within an insurance company but generalized to be

applicable for product and service companies as well. The stages of the Fugle model

are familiar from many previous innovation process models (e.g. Rothwell, 1994;

Chesbrough, 2003), but Preez & Louw (2008) have described the functions of each

stage in details, which is something new. The authors of this study have not found

any other sources related to this matter.

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It needs to be kept in mind that, although the Fugle model seems to be a linear

staged process, there are many iterative loops and many of these steps (e.g. idea

generation and idea capturing) also occur simultaneously. In addition, portfolio

management stage actually occurs throughout the process. (Preez & Louw, 2008)

Figure 7 The Fugle Innovation Process (Preez & Louw, 2008) [modified]

5.4.1 Idea generation/ identification stage

In the Fugle Innovation Process model, the idea generation / identification stage is

the first one in the process and creative from its nature. As the name tells, this is a

stage for generating new ideas and identifying new business opportunities. The

sources of new ideas include both internal and external sources and they can be a

result of accidents or focused workshops and brainstorming sessions. Preez &

Louw (2008) illustrate this stage using an agricultural metaphor, “provide the seeds

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and fertiliser for new ideas to grow”. Later stages include harvesting, filtering and

storing these ideas for further development. (Preez & Louw, 2008)

According to Preez & Louw (2008), information can be used to fertilize ideas. The

following kind of information can be provided to stimulate the generation of new

ideas:

• information about current problems or problem areas in the business,

• information about competitors,

• information about clients and markets,

• information about technologies,

• information about company strategies and objectives.

(Preez & Louw, 2008)

Although many ideas may arise accidentally, they need hard thinking to determine

their significance. This can be facilitated by providing the right information to

ideators. In addition, the whole idea needs to be documented to communicate it to

others and develop it further (Gaynor, 2002). Preez & Louw (2008) points out that

this is important especially because many ideas can become more feasible in the

future even if they are first rejected due to current circumstances. When

documenting, an ideator also needs to take into account the development life cycle,

the relevant team members and the external factors. (Preez & Louw, 2008)

Finally, ideas need to be filtered to allocate scarce resources to the development of

the most current, promising and feasible ideas, even if the risk to reject some good

ideas occurs. A company’s strategy provides a natural guide to filtering. Ideas

which are not in line with company strategies can be rejected – for now. However,

rejected ideas should be documented with the reasons for their rejection to better

evaluate them in the future. (Preez & Louw, 2008)

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5.4.2 Concept definition stage

The concept definition stage focuses on transforming the idea, or a group of

different ideas, into a one functional concept. According to Preez & Louw (2008),

the documented concept should then be shared with different people in order for

the concept to develop and to be evaluated. New ideas can still be added to the

concept. Ideas are filtered again after this stage to select the most promising into a

feasibility evaluation phase. (Preez & Louw, 2008)

5.4.3 Concept feasibility and refinement stage

At the concept definition stage, the concept is investigated further against new

information about the market situation and a prototype of it is made. The approach

to be used here is “quick and dirty”, or like Wycoff (2003) says, “fail fast and smart”.

It is cheaper and better to fail earlier at this stage than during any later stages. This

stage should be considered as a learning experience. Typically, concept still refines

during this stage, but at the end, a funding of the concept should be decided and

thus the outcome of this stage is a list of potential innovation projects. (Preez &

Louw, 2008)

5.4.4 Portfolio stage

In the portfolio stage, all the innovation initiatives that have passed the previous

filtering stages should be placed in a portfolio, which should be managed

holistically. Other stages will also help to prioritize, schedule and align the

initiatives. In addition, resources should be allocated, responsibilities assigned,

initiatives continuously monitored in portfolio stage as well as to ensure that the

strategic alignment remains. (Preez & Louw, 2008)

5.4.5 Deployment stage

The deployment stage includes the design, implementation, and testing of the idea

concept. It also involves the project plan in more detail and management of the

projects. The next step is the actual roll-out the product, followed by refinement &

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formalization stage, which concentrates on monitoring, measuring, evaluating and

refining the product that most likely does not yet work perfectly – until it does, at

least, satisfactorily. (Preez & Louw, 2008)

Finally, the product can be taken to exploitation stage, where the future business

potential of it is exploited through new business models and markets. To reach this

stage, an idea needs to pass one more filter, “exploitation gate”. (Preez & Louw,

2008)

5.5 Case Facebook

An interesting example of online communities that are voluntarily used in a huge

extent, without incentives, is Facebook. Facebook has over 400 million users and its

users spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook (Facebook, 2010). A

lot of academic research has also been made around Facebook. Why is it so

popular? We will now go through some of these studies to see if there are some

out-of-the-box functions we could utilize in idea marketplaces, although they are

primarily not social networking sites.

According to Wellman & Gulia (1999), some of the most important functions of

online communities in general are familiar from offline life: providing information

resources, social and emotional support and ties to other people. Social capital is

also one important advantage online communities can offer (Ellison et al., 2006).

However, the main reason to use specifically Facebook is “social searching”, which

simply refers to using Facebook to find out more about people who have been met

offline (Lampe et al., 2006). The second most important reason is to keep in touch

with old friends. (Lampe et al., 2006). An interesting detail is that 41,6 percent of

the messages are sent outside of one’s local network (Table 6), which suggests that

Facebook is also used to build social ties and social capital across distances (Golder

et al., 2007). Instead, users are not interested in “social browsing”, that is, finding

people online to meet them offline later. (Joinson, 2008)

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Table 6 Frequency of mentions of reasons to use Facebook (Joinson, 2008)

Theme (sample user generated items) Number of mentions

"Keeping in touch" Contacting friends who are away from home, chatting to people I otherwise would have lost contact with

52

Passive contact, social surveillance Virtual people-watching 19

"Re-acquiring lost contacts" Reconnecting with people I've lost contact with, finding people you haven't seen for a while

15

"Communication" Being poked, private messages, writing on walls 15

Photographs Tagged in picture, posting pictures, sharing pictures 11

Design related Ease of use 4

Perpetual contact Seeing what people have put as their "status", the continuous updates, seeing what my friends have been up today

4

"Making new contacts" Talking to singles, getting new friends, joining groups

5

5.6 Summary

Chapter 5 introduced a few studies made on innovation management tools and

functions, as well as related areas, collaboration and knowledge management tools,

which can be utilized when designing an idea marketplace.

Table 7 below summarizes tools and functions mentioned in this chapter. Tools and

functions have been grouped according to their use. The division to tools and

functions is perhaps ambiguous in some cases, but however necessary, as not all

items in the table can be converted into tools (e.g. rewarding), neither functions

(e.g. user profile). Table 7 follows the structure of this chapter otherwise, but “Idea

creation” group and under it idea creation related tools and functions from all

chapters have been added. In addition, duplicates have been removed. If some

feature is mentioned in several contexts, in Table 7 it is placed according to the first

mention. Some features have been moved from their original group to the group

that better describes the features. For instance, “Advice” and “Ask for help” have

been moved from idea creation to knowledge management. Basically, features from

KIMS were moved under Idea creation as they were all about it, while KIMS itself

was removed.

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All in all, most features are rather abstract functions than clear sets of tools. That is,

existing articles do not describe how to implement these functions, they only

describe, what one should be able to do in an idea marketplace. Moreover, the few

identified tools do not actually tell what to do with them, but they can be creatively

used to implement the identified functions.

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Table 7 Summary of tools and functions of chapter 5

Collaboration Idea creation Knowledge management

Enabling functions Idea creation process Facebook

Functions Seeing who's online

Rating Offering opinions Aggregating information from internal and external sources

Fertilizing ideas with information

Providing information resources

Seeing what others do

Refining ideas Suggesting improvements

Identifying needs of the company Harvesting ideas Providing social and emotional support

Hearing news Promoting Observing Harnessing external stakeholders to meet the need

Filtering ideas against strategy

Providing ties to other people

Rewarding Commenting Learning and sharing knowledge

Having idea competitions to release the "sticky knowledge"

Storing ideas Offering social capital

Searching Suggesting Asking for help Management support Documenting an idea and a reason for possible rejection

Keeping in touch with people

Telling stories Submitting idea Advicing Extreme programming Concepting ideas Browsing people

Complaining Testing ideas Aligned roles, responsibilities and relationships

Evaluating concepts Reconnecting with people

Discussing Experiencing Change culture and behavior Evaluating idea feasibility Adding pictures

Sharing multimedia Designing, building and testing prototypes

Comparing Placing ideas to portfolio Entertaining oneself Managing time and

resources

Making money and getting recognition

"Selling" ideas "Buying" ideas Tools Design tools Blog Social search

APIs Wiki Status Podcast User profile Videocast Tags Social networks

Recommendation algorithms

RSS feed

Time management

IM

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6. Synthesis of the literature review

The literature offered plenty of material on the research question, i.e., how to get

organizations’ employees, customers and other stakeholders to use the new idea

marketplace to support the idea creation process. The research question was

divided into three sub-questions about motivations, features and roles that should

be in place in an idea marketplace. The objective of the literature review was to

identify the issues related to motivations, features and roles from the literature and

structuring a synthesis based on them.

A variety of issues were identified. First, innovation process models were

introduced to explain the context and essential target of idea creation. The

presented innovation process model studies confirmed that the concept of an idea

marketplace is on the right track – end users, cooperation across knowledge

domains and openness are needed to meet the needs of the rapidly evolving and

more and more competitive environment as well as more demanding customers.

The role of chapters 3, 4 and 5 was to find out how to implement such an idea

marketplace which would appeal to customers, employees and other stakeholders,

the emphasis being on end-users. Three factors were chosen: motivations, roles

and features, which are strongly tied together and affect each other. At first,

features are needed to motivate people to participate in an idea marketplace.

People will have different roles already when first visiting an idea marketplace, and

different roles are motivated by different motivators. Roles seem to change over

time, for instance from a newbie to a core member. The literature does not tell it

directly, but different roles are most likely motivated by different motivators and

similarly different features motivate different roles.

The literature review has found out what are the separate motivators, roles and

features. Chapter 3 discussed motivations and suggested that extrinsic and intrinsic

motivations as well as motivators and hygiene factors are needed, but the impact of

monetary reward remained unclear. Chapter 4 reviewed six different kinds of

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online communities and identified even 55 different roles that occur in online

communities. Finally, 55 functions and 15 online community tools were found in

the literature. However, no studies have been made on the relations between these

issues. Thus, it will be the objective of the next part, Use case study. Other objective

will be to evaluate the identified motivators, roles and features in idea creation

context, as most of them were found in studies concerned online communities in

general, instead of idea creation environments.

55 roles

Motivations8 extrinsic, 13

intrinsic

Features55 functions,

15 tools

IDEA MARKETPLACEopeness, end users,

cooperation

Different roles are interested in different features

Features motivate to participate

Different roles are motivated from different factors

Figure 8 Synthesis of the literature review

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PART III: USE CASE STUDY

7. Methodology of the study

This case study is made by using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Three

different kinds of research methods were used. They are a survey for end-users,

expert interviews and observation in idea creation site. This kind of research

method, which combines methodologies of the same phenomenon in the same

study, is called triangulation. It is been used for cross validation when multiple

different methods are found to be congruent and yield comparable data and to

strengthen statistical results using qualitative methods. Triangulation can capture a

more complete, holistic, and contextual picture of the matters being studied as

different methods compensate the weaknesses of each other. (Jick, 1979)

Qualitative approach is holistic from its nature and is gathered in a real-life context

using qualitative methods, such as theme interviews and observations (Hirsjärvi et

al., 2007). This study is as well made in natural environment by interviewing

people and observing an idea creation website. Qualitative methods are often an

instrument to gather information straight from people (Hirsjärvi et al., 2007), as

has been done in this study – interviews are opinions, experiences and perceptions

of experts. Results of a qualitative study are inductive, not tested theories or

hypotheses. Unlike quantitative methods, qualitative methods support selecting

data practically, not for example using random sampling. (Hirsjärvi et al., 2007) In

this study, the interviewees and observed users have also been selected

consciously to find answers to questions which have been currently acute for the

project. According to the qualitative approach, all cases are unique and the material

should be considered as such (Hirsjärvi et al., 2007).

In addition to qualitative methods, quantitative survey questionnaire was made.

Quantitative studies are often based on conclusions of former studies and theories

(Hirsjärvi et al., 2007), like in this study survey questionnaire is based on

motivations identified in the literature. Also hypotheses are typical for qualitative

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methods (Hirsjärvi et al., 2007) but actual hypotheses are not presented in this

study. However, for instance based on literature it was expected that money

wouldn’t necessarily motivate to be creative and that’s being tested. Other qualities

of quantitative studies include setting variables to a table and transforming the

data into a form which can be analyzed statistically, for instance by describing

results in percentages, (Hirsjärvi et al., 2007) which is done also for survey

questionnaire of this study.

The objective of the case study was to find some new and differentiating

motivations, features and roles for an idea marketplace. Based on the literature

review, a survey questionnaire regarding end-users’ motivations was constructed.

The objective of the survey was to find out what motivates different kinds of users

to use idea crowdsourcing websites in general, but also specifically, if money does

not motivate to ideate but is only a hygiene factor. It was not possible to find out

exactly what roles the respondents represent, but this theme was approached by

asking some background information and interests. The survey questionnaire is in

Appendix 1.

Observation was used to study roles in a well-functioning idea creation community,

Dell’s IdeaStorm. In the literature review, 55 roles were identified and finally,

grouped into 7 categories. However, roles were identified from online communities

which were not concentrated on idea creation. Therefore, observation was needed

to validate that identified roles are relevant, and that, after all, the nature of the site

is not so crucial, but the same roles are needed in every community. Occurring

conversations were compared with the identified roles to see which roles actually

exist in an idea marketplace.

Finally, interviews were used to collect data about open questions that arouse from

the literature review and other data. Particularly, interviews were used to identify

new features that are not yet used in idea marketplaces. 17 experts from the fields

of innovation, idea creation, R&D and IT were interviewed. 16 interviews were

conducted at first, and one more after the first interviews had been analyzed. The

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last interview was used to validate conclusions and complete the results by

answering questions that arouse from the results. Because the meaning of different

interviews was to find out different issues, interviews were theme interviews from

their nature, and thus, an exact question form cannot be presented. Interviews

were transcribed and similar comments grouped according to themes.

All three research methods, survey, observation and interviews are described in

more detail in following chapters.

7.1 Survey

The survey questionnaire is in Appendix 1. A link to the survey was sent via

different social media – Facebook, Twitter and the Company’s internal

microblogging tool, as well as by e-mail to get answers from people who are not

that active in social media. The number of recipients of the survey is unknown

because of the nature of the used channel, social media.

Answers were gathered in two stages – at first, to test the survey and make

according changes, and then, to gather final answers. Unfortunately, the last stage

gained less answers than the first one, and therefore, the responses of the former

had to be included in the final results, although some changes were made after the

first stage. One question about the income of the respondents was added after the

test round to search if money motivates more people from the lower income levels.

Some options to motivations were also added.

93 respondents answered to the survey. Most of them were from 20 to 29 years

old, but there were respondents in other age categories as well, except in the

category “15-19 years old”. The distribution between female and male respondents

was almost the same, 51 percent females and 49 percent male. The great majority

of the respondents lived in urban Europe.

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7.2 Observation

IdeaStorm by Dell is one of the oldest and best known idea crowdsourcing website.

It was established in February 2007, and by December 2010, 14,994 ideas had been

shared, 90 764 comments posted and 426 ideas implemented (Dell, 2010).

The objective of IdeaStorm is similar to the objective of the idea marketplace of the

Company. Dell also writes in the site that IdeaStorm was created to hear the voice

of customers and allow them to share ideas in cooperation with each other and

Dell. In addition, Dell has idea crowdsourcing challenges, which they call “Storm

Session”.

The objective of the observation was to validate the findings from the literature

review by observing a real idea crowdsourcing website. Many roles were found in

the literature, but they were identified from online communities outside of an idea

creation context. Therefore, it was needed to confirm what kinds of roles were

needed in an idea marketplace.

The research method used was observation. Observation provides direct

information about behavior and actions of individuals, groups or organizations. It

gives the researcher an access to the natural environment and a possibility to study

the real world. In many cases, the presence of the researcher may disturb the

observed target and even have an effect on its behavior (Hirsjärvi et al., 1997), but

in this case, the researcher was invisible for users as the idea crowdsourcing

website did not even require signing in. Most conversations had even been had

before this study started. The researcher did not participate in conversations or

contact ideators.

In practice, data was first collected by observing the conversations of the most

active users of the site, called “jervis961”, “dhart”, “badblood”, “phubert” and

“jmxz”, as well as moderators called “jackie_c”, “william_l” and “dawn_l”. These

users were chosen because of their activity rates, which included thousands of

comments and votes and hundreds of ideas. Thus, they could perhaps represent

some behaviors which do not occur on random visitors. However, comments of

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these users were analyzed as a part of conversations with any users. Therefore,

comments of other interesting users were also collected, if they represented some

behavior that had not occurred before.

The number of occurrences was not counted. This was decided because a few

behaviors represented almost all of the comments, while others occurred only once

or twice or not at all. Collecting data was finished when the data saturated, that is,

no new roles were found anymore. However, it must be kept in mind that

IdeaStorm includes over 90,000 comments, most of which were not read. Thus, it is

very likely that some rare behaviors were missed. On the other hand, in a study of

this scale, there is no possibility to review such a huge amount of data. Instead, data

was looked from the most obvious places as described.

7.3 Interviews

Altogether 17 interviews were conducted during the research process. The

interviews were conducted in face-to-face meetings, but some interviews had to be

conducted via teleconference. All of the interviews were recorded and transcribed,

a part of them by the researcher herself and the rest by an external service

provider. In addition, three interview tapes were lost because of a technical issue

and, consequently, these interviews could not be utilized.

Interviewees were chosen from all around the Company to represent the most

important internal stakeholders as well as some external experts from the field of

innovation and social media. Internal stakeholders included Betalabs, Backstage,

Nokia Care, Nokia Digital Marketing, Forum Nokia, Consumer Analytics and

Insights and Mobile Solutions, which are basically all parties in the Company with

some experience of social media. A traditional division into business units was

irrelevant for this study, as the Company does not have social media

representatives in all units. External experts either came from YLE, IBM, Dicole,

Zipipop and Überkuul or were independent consultants.

All the interviewees had personal experience in online communities and most of

them were running a community or social media service in some role. Thus, they

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were asked broadly about motivations, features and roles. Since the interviews

were conducted in different stages of the research process, themes varied a lot

depending on the issue currently studied. Therefore, there are no certain questions

to be presented here, but Appendix 2 lists each interviewee and the discussed

themes.

Once the interviews had been transcribed, the data was grouped into themes and

color coded according to the interviewees. The root themes were the same as the

themes of this study, roles, motivations and features. In addition, however, the

concept of an idea marketplace itself raised some concerns and thoughts.

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8 The case company

The Company is a Finnish multinational communications corporation. The

Company manufactures mobile devices with over 61,000 employees (including

NAVTEQ), having sales in more than 160 countries. The Company’s global annual

revenue equaled EUR 41 billion and operating profit was €1.2 billion in 2009. The

Company is the world's leading manufacturer of mobile telephones: its global

device market share was 30 percent in the third quarter 2010. (Nokia, 2010)

In the background of this study is the Company's need to create a new corporate

level idea crowdsourcing website for its employees and interest groups from all

around the world. The Company's whole business is based on ideas and

innovations. Ideas can come from any employee, customer or supplier and can be

implemented by any employee of the Company. Since the Company is a

multinational company, the ecosystem is huge and needs an effective tool to

coordinate this idea creation process. Besides own employees, the Company’s

current ecosystem includes 1.2 billion consumers, over four million registered

application developers, and content providers, operators and other industry

partners around the Company’s devices and services (Nokia, 2010). To be

competitive, ideas need to be invented, found, evaluated and implemented fast,

before rivals.

At the moment, the Company already has multiple tools in use as idea creation

platforms. According to one interviewee, 58 different idea creation tools have been

used. The problem is that none of them is used corporate-wide, but only locally. To

be effective, the idea marketplace of the Company should cover the whole

ecosystem. Therefore, the Company has to create a new idea marketplace and take

it into use.

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8.1 Existing idea creation platforms

The Company’s idea crowdsourcing websites form a funnel, which consists of three

stages. Stages are Idea generation, Conversion and Concepting and Diffusion.

(Nokia intranet, 2010)

Figure 9 Company's innovation funnel

8.1.1 Idea generation in the Company’s innovation funnel

According to an interview of the Company’s head of innovation crowdsourcing, on

21st of December 2010, the first stage means simply generating ideas using

different kind of brainstorming techniques and platforms. Most of the Company’s

idea crowdsourcing websites are designed exactly for this purpose. Ideas are also

stored into these systems, and most of them are actually dead-ends – ideas are

going nowhere from the system. But this is to be changed with the future solution.

All ideas will be moved in one way or another to the new one-and-only idea

crowdsourcing website. (the Company’s head of innovation crowdsourcing)

The internal platforms include Sphere, IdeaCentral and several wikis. Wikis has

mostly been places for taking notes and store non-finalized, but perhaps some

really valuable ideas. Sphere is an internal version of the future idea marketplace,

which has already been running since 2008. IdeaCentral is a competing platform

with good harvesting capabilities but weak social capabilities. (the Company’s head

of innovation crowdsourcing)

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External web-sites include a website which targets on finding ideas that matter

most to the future of communications; a global developer competition designed to

create applications and services for Company’s mobile devices around, e.g.,

entertainment and life improvement; competition to connect the best consumer

generated application ideas with top developers from all over the world and

develop the best of them; African idea crowdsourcing site around topics like

Ecosystem for Innovation and Sustainability Models for Base of Pyramid. (Nokia

Intranet, 2010)

8.1.2 Conversion and concepting in the Company’s innovation funnel

In the second stage, ideas are developed into concepts and the first versions of the

products. For this stage, the Company offers four platforms, which are Betalabs,

Backstage, Forum the Company and Nokia Pilots.

The objective of Betalabs is to share some of the exciting new applications and

services that the Company has been working on, and to collect feedback about how

they work in real-life situations. Backstage is an internal version of Betalabs (Nokia

intranet, 2011).

Forum Nokia is a community of 4,000,000 developers, for which Forum Nokia

offers technical information, software, applications and interfaces to develop new

applications to Ovi Store, the Company’s web store. (Forum the Company, 2011)

Nokia Pilots is a program for anyone who wants to test the Company’s new

products. Consumers may borrow products that are now yet available in stores and

give some feedback about them. (Nokia Pilots, 2011)

8.1.3 Diffusion in the Company’s innovation funnel

In the third stage, ideas have already been realized as services and products. The

purpose of this stage is to collect the feedback from consumers, partners and

vendors and deliver it back to the beginning of the loop to be taken into account

when designing new products. The Company’s partners, such as operators, are

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innovative and willing to cooperate. Unfortunately, this does not yet fully happen,

as there is no consolidated place for this feedback, neither an established process to

deliver the feedback. The only established piece of it is the Company Care, a place

for consumer feedback, which, however, is not fully utilized yet.

8.2 Idea Marketplace

The Idea Marketplace, a planned idea marketplace of the Company, has been

designed to solve most of the described problems. It will unite the fragmented

innovation and idea creation platforms and speed up the product development

process. Consumers’ voice will be better heard and developer community engaged.

Product backlog will be partially generated by the crowd, but also rated by the

crowd. As a result, the Company will get better products faster.

The project is run by a group of the Company’s employees and external consultants.

The number of members of the project team varied during the project, but the

division to “business” and “IT” streams has remained. Currently, seven people have

been assigned for the project full-time and a few people are helping the IT steam

part-time. The business stream has been concepting requirements for the Idea

Marketplace, planning how to use it in practice and making according preparations,

such as finding partners for idea challenges. Also the researcher herself has been

part of this steam. After the launch of the Idea Marketplace, the business stream

will be running challenges in the Idea Marketplace and continue finding proper

partners. The IT stream has been implementing the requirements and it will take

care of new requirements, IT support and needed modifications in the future. The

team has been simultaneously developing further the internal idea crowdsourcing

capability.

8.2.1 Features

Figure 10 illustrates the planned concept and its features on a high level. The model

describes one idea challenge in the Idea Marketplace from the beginning to the end.

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A challenge refers to outsourcing a certain task to the crowd through an open call.

Challenges are organized in cooperation with partners and other interesting

stakeholders. Some possible challenges could be, for example, creating ideas a

green phone in cooperation with WWF or concepting a kids’ phone with UNICEF.

The idea challenge includes five stages. In the first stage, ideas are shared and rated

by the crowd. In the second stage, similar, promising ideas are combined to groups,

which will get through to next stages. Other ideas will get a kind feedback about

rejection. In the third stage, groups will develop their common idea further, for

instance, by creating a demo and a business plan of it. Each group will also get a

“guardian”, an experienced expert from the field, to give feedback. In the fourth

stage, ideas are promoted to the Company “sponsors” who have the power and the

resources to make ideas happen. They also have the best knowledge about what is

needed from the Company’s perspective. They choose one or several winners and

commit in making the winning idea or ideas real. Winners get rewarded. If the

winning idea is a local application, it will be delivered to developers in Forum

Nokia or other stakeholder to implement. “Core” applications and mobile phone

features are implemented by the Company.

Figure 10 Idea challenge process in the Idea Marketplace

8.2.2 Roles

Not that much attention has been paid to roles in the community. The noted roles

include ideators, contributors, facilitators, harvesters and guardians. Ideators are

users who submit ideas. Contributors vote and comment and can volunteer to help

bringing ideas further. Ideators and contributors can be the same people.

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Harvesters are the Company’s employees or representatives from the partner

organization of the challenge who know the theme of the challenge very well. They

will read all the ideas and select the most promising ones as well as group similar

ideas together. Usually, a workshop is organized to do this face to face. Harvesters

also ensure that all the participants will receive feedback. In this context,

facilitators refer to people who organize the workshop and take care of the

communication towards finalists as well as rejected ideators. They inform ideators

of groupings and next steps. Guardians is a new concept, which has not yet been

experimented in the real life, but in practice, guardians would guide the groups, as

they know the field and existing products and are thus able to identify actual new

ideas.

8.2.3 Motivations

Figure 11 presents motivators which have been identified and grouped by the

business stream:

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Figure 11 Motivators to participate in idea crowdsourcing challenges

The motivators in Figure 11 are to be used as a reward for winning or participating

in challenges. This far, prizes in internal challenges have included mobile phones,

headsets, money to make the idea real, and Kudos, a recognition combined with a

small monetary reward by the winner’s line manager. In the first external

challenge, Open Innovation Africa Summit (OIAS), all finalists got a free trip to

Naivasha, Kenya, where the winner was chosen. In the Make My App N8 challenge,

eight best ideas were implemented and the winning ideas were rewarded with

100,000 dollars. “Passing time” and “having fun” as well as “making a change” has

been covered alike. In the OIAS challenge, the reward was unique; finalists would

otherwise not have had access to the summit.

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9 Results

9.1 Results from the observation of Dell’s IdeaStorm

An established idea crowdsourcing site, IdeaStorm by Dell, was observed to

validate if the roles identified in the literature review apply to an idea creation

community in addition to general online communities.

The observation was made by reading conversations of most active users,

moderators and random users and identifying which roles of those found in the

literature review occurred in this real website. Examples of matching messages of

conversations were gathered in an excel sheet and will be presented in following

sub-chapters. Occurrences were counted up to five and after that the occurrence of

the role in questions was considered as a common role, for instance dozens of

messages were from opinion providers or initiators.

The users have been grouped into two groups according to their activity. The

groups are active lead users, and normal users who only visit the site once. In

addition, moderators were observed.

9.1.1 Normal users

A great majority of latest ideas were posted by users, who had not otherwise

contributed to the site. They had posted only one idea and voted for it. Thus, the

number of different roles identified from the literature within normal users was

low – in sum, they were information seekers, opinion providers, initiators or

problem posers. One expert was also found, but, based on his only comment, it was

evident that he had been reading the site for quite some time.

The most common role was an initiator. People came to the site to post an idea,

which often seemed to arise from their everyday-life experiences. These ideas

included the following:

“Pink Laptops with customized casings (fashion branded a la sx and the city)”

(labrat1)

“We need to come out with a Dell compatible DJ controller maybe add extra keys like

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the touch pad for DJ mixing and have a better sound card with better bass and treble

output. I am glad to see that my Inspiron had a very good output for the mixer to

connect to the netbook. Maybe include DJ mixing software and make work faster for

music mixing. Come out with a netbook just for DJ's.” (gccradioscience)

The former is a really stereotyped “idea”, which anyone could imagine. These often

occur, but it is hard to imagine any business value for them. The latter, instead, is

an example of an idea that seems to arise from a real need of some niche, music

makers, in this case. This idea got immediate attention from the other user group,

lead users, and moreover, the attention was conflicting, which, based on the

interviews, is often a signal of innovation. An administrator of Dell, “bill_b” and the

most active user of the service, “jervis961”, were interested in the idea. Another

lead user, “sugarbear”, claimed instead that the Internet is already full of free music

software.

Another common role was a problem poser. Users tend to complain about

something they have bought but are not happy with.

“In November of 2010, I purchased a Dell PC along with an external dial up modem

and speakers for my mother as a Christmas present. --- When I got home for

Christmas (December 23) I found out that mom had decided to cancel her dial up

internet service and had subscribed to DSL service. --- I finally was told by a Dell

customer service representative that it was past the 21 day return policy and that

"return was not an option". --- With Dell's refusal to accept back a $50.00 item,

purchased as a Christmas gift, rest assured, I will not purchase Dell products again in

the future.” (LGS)

“So my question is: how come, after so many years since the first notebook came into

existence, no one has invented a notebook with a monitor that can be pulled up so it

stays at the same level as one's eyes? --- Maybe the result isn't the most esthetic one,

but it would be a very comfortable solution that would allow the user to put the

notebook on his lap and pull the monitor up to the same level of his eyes (thus not

having to bend over and adopt horrible positions)”. (Ney)

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The first story is really common, but it is hard to imagine what kind of value it

provides to the site. Instead of an idea, it is more like feedback. However, in the

next complaint, there is actually also a usability improvement suggested.

The following quotation illustrates opinion provider:

“I am VERY VERY interested in purchasing your Inspiron duo laptop, but not until a

few things happen. 1) It needs to be a REAL COMPUTER! none of this ATOM junk, a

real i3, i5, or i7, with at least 4gigs of memory and a substantial amount of memory

too. 2)The screen size isn't TERRIBLY small, but perhaps a 15 or 16 inch would be

nicer. “(casador)

In addition, there was one example of an information seeker:

“I bought a vostro 3500 from dell's online two weeks ago. The notebook delivered this

monday. When took the notebook from the package box, I found the keyboard

function bad. some middlo keys bulge and blank key has not function. I don't know

why the new one has this problem. Could you tell me a good solution.” (casador)

In the same message, the same user took also a role of an atmosphere constructor:

“I would LOVE to be the first of my friends to have this new and improved Duo, for I

think you have an incredible idea going here and a profitable one at that.” (casador)

Finally, there was one exceptional comment, which showed some expertise and

revealed that the user had been reading the site for a longer time, but not been

posting anything before.

“Dell monitors for Optplex PC's are not malfunctioning : My first post for feed back to

all Dell Optiplex users, I have a home network with 2 pc's and 4 monitors each

recieving independant data a Dell360 with service tag under warrenty, A reaccurring

technical difficulty arises with improper, incomplete or poor programming on the

web which would inevaitably lead to what a ppears a Dell monitor failure and or

motherboard, Dell has provided relaiable and stable aftermarket service travelling

500 kilometres to isolated rural where I live.In fact Dell's motherboars or monitors

have not failed. What happens is ---. In any event if the reader does come across this

technical difficulty where Dell's monitor powers up but not turn on after rebooting

and will not display, the solution is to ---“ (matross)

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9.1.2 Lead users

Lead users were divided into two groups: active users who had voted or

commented dozens of times and the most active users who had contributed

hundreds or thousands of times.

Both groups include a wide range of roles identified in the literature review and the

roles are basically the same for both groups. Their communication is mostly related

to information processing, and especially, offering information. Most common

behaviors include reminders, experts, information providers, opinion providers

and, as a contrast, atmosphere constructors. Most often, activists provide

information. Typical comments are as follows:

"OpenOffice 3.0 distribution has begun; official release announcement on Monday.

Downloads available from http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#extmirrors At

any archive, browse to 'stable' then browse to '3.0.0' and look for the binary for your

platform: Win32Intel, MacOSXIntel, LinuxIntel (slightly larger files with the tag

'wJRE' include Java6)." (dhart)

Similarly, activists’ expertise was shown in numerous comments, such as:

"Just for fun I tried pricing equivalent configurations of E1505 and E1505Ns. I tried

making the config as similar as possible - the only difference (except the OS of course)

I'm aware of being that the same graphics card was not available on both. E1505N

has a "256MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 7300 Turbocache" and the E1505 has a "256MB

ATI MOBILITY RADEON X1400 HyperMemory”. Both came in at $1133." (jmxz)

In addition to objective information, activists often provide subjective opinions.

Some typical comments include:

“Dell you have to strike while the iron is hot and release these because by Q4 they will

be outdated." (jervis961)

Naturally, they are active initiators as they have all sent hundreds of ideas, except

“dhart”, who has sent the two most voted ideas of IdeaStorm, and only a few other

ideas. However, not all submitted ideas “stimulate the group, and provide new ideas

or thought”, as the description of this role goes. Actually, most ideas are not new as

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such. For instance, the implemented ideas include ideas like "offer an attractive

green trade-in program", "On FaceBook Dell Spot add something to denote it`s a

Canadian site", "Dell Inspiron 17 should also get personalization with the design

studio like with Inspiron 15, Studio 15, and Studio 17", "Dell Ink and Printers - Sell

them at Best Buy and other stores", "Ubuntu on Studio Notebooks" and "Children's

PC". In other words, these ideas are just incremental instead of radical innovations.

The most popular ideas included likewise ideas. On the other hand, it is impossible

to say which ideas are innovative from Dell’s perspective – maybe they had not

thought about offering Ubuntu on Studio Notebooks before someone mentioned it

and it got voted well.

Lead users were also actively reminding administrators about missing but

promised or expected updates on the site or products:

“The Streak has been out for a while now, still no update.” (jervis961)

Although the Activists seemed to be extremely loyal to Dell, they were occasionally

also criticizing Dell:

“--- The site is finally becoming exactly what Dell had envisioned. Its an online

suggestion box and not much more. The site had so much potential but was doomed

from the start. Buggy beta software, lack of moderation and lack of interaction have

all improved since the launch but never reached the levels that I think Michael

Dell envisioned. He spoke of customers having access like they were "walking the

halls" at Dell and creating products with the customers but I don't see

much openness.” (jervis961)

As a contrast to the information related content, lead users were also maintaining

the atmosphere, encouraging others and partnering:

"Thank You Dell!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You did it right!!!!!!!!!!!! Just turned on and am posting from

my new E1505N Ubuntu Dell Laptop." (jmxz)

"@penguinsa good analysis!" (dhart)

In addition, lead users seemed to form their own “inner circle”, which was also

connected outside of IdeaStorm site:

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“Hey jervis. How ya doin? :) Yes, I stop by from time to time to see how the old

regulars are doing. Even though there aren't many left. As for there being no way to

edit anymore. --- Too bad you've given up on you own web site. I see you haven't

posted anything in months. Aikiwolfie is still posting to his. I add something to mine

occasionally. But I have been spending more time with phubert's site. They tend to

discuss just about anything. So I can enter when they hit something of interest. Posted

some of my own ides. You should stop by there sometime. Not a bad bunch.” (gmat)

There were also some signs about hero, jmxz. Comments regarding him included:

"'m just waiting for jmxz to start his own ideas site." (zmjjmz)

"Maybe we could get cosh back to help him. He was awesome at building a site."

(jervis961)

In addition, jervis961 was once noted to greet and catalyst members, as well as to

host members, which refers to the role of provider:

“Welcome to the site werriot and matthias1e. You two should exchange email

addresses since you both joined today and the only activity you have is voting on the

same 4 ideas. You have a lot in common. :)” (jervis961)

"would go with thwo smaller side screens to cut down on the bulk. Have you seen the

new Lenovo W700?" (posts a picture demonstrating the idea) (jervis961)

Once jervis961 even acted like recorder by reminding someone about former

solution:

"How could you miss the Dell Streak? In December of 2008 Aikiwolfie posted an idea

to make an Android based phone/PDA/MP3 player/all around device. I'm sure he'd

like a little recognition for his idea." (jervis961)

9.1.3 Moderators

Three moderators, “jackie_c”, “william_l” and “dawn_l” were examined accordingly.

The role of the moderators seemed to be quite monotonic when acting in a service

– they mainly provided information, clarified misconceptions, and in some extend,

sought information. Highly typical comments of each role included:

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"Thanks, we'll take your comment into consideration. Typically consumers have not

been willing to pay extra for the Computrace-style feature set." (william_l)

"@sporitus: There is not a "next step." The business will review the idea and if Dell

would like to act upon your suggestion, we will. Thank you!" (jackie_c)

"cheese3915, would you please elaborate? I don't know what you mean by an

"internal battery" or by "battery-docking mechanisms" -- I would have thought all our

batteries are internal already. " (william_l)

Interestingly, dawn_l showed some signs of roles of clowns and greeters. The clown

can be seen in the following comments:

"Ethereak1- Thanks so much for bringing this to our attention. Since this case is over

and It did not involve Dell, we can't really comment on it. Jervis- Silly man... you know

we read them all! Dawn" (dawn_l)

"Doh- Of course I meant that we will NOT have as many bugs. Perhaps I should wait

until after my first dose of caffeine before posting! LOL. Doh Dawn" (dawn_l)

She was also noted to greet one user, but not all:

"We are happy to have you join the Ideastorm crew and hope you stick around and

participate on other ideas as well! Dawn" (dawn_l)

From a hierarchical dimension, the moderators were respected, and they often

closed conversations as well as proposed new solutions and evaluated other

solutions. It is impossible to know about the technical administration which is not

visible for end-users, but in any case, these features do not correspond with any

hierarchical roles as such, but they are more like a combination of them. However,

they give an impression of being somewhat under activists in the hierarchy,

although they are not fully comparable. This is because they repeatedly ask help

from activists, take their feedback really seriously and give up when debating.

9.1.4 Summary of the observation results

It emerged that there are two different kinds of sets of roles in IdeaStorm. The first

group includes people who have visited the site only once and come there for some

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certain purpose, to post something they have in mind. The other group consists of

active users, who have visited the site more often and mostly comment and vote for

other ideas. This indicates that people do not come to the site with some specific

agenda, but rather to spend some time, perhaps to learn or network.

The difference between these two groups and their roles is clear. The set of roles

becomes more versatile immediately after the number of votes and comments

increases over one. There does not seem to be many users who have commented or

voted a couple of times – either you just submit your idea and do not contribute to

others, or you comment and vote dozens of times. Furthermore, the set of roles of

the active and the most active is almost the same. Only the catalyst and the

remainder are roles that were not found in the role set of activists, but they were

included in the roles of the most active users, but also in that group only once. In

addition, inside jokes and referrals to others from the same groups in comments

are missing from the role of active users.

All this indicates that there are actually only two different roles – the random

visitors who come to the site to say something they want to say to Dell, and the lead

users who come there for some other reason, which could be just spending time,

learning or networking.

The role of moderator was really basic and did not include any signs of community

facilitator role, which was raised a lot in the interviews and will be introduced in

chapter 9.3.3.3.

9.2 Survey questionnaire results

The survey questionnaire was sent via different social media to an undefined group

of social media users to validate if traditional motivations to work and use general

online communities applied to idea creation.

Two groups of respondents were identified in the data and they were compared.

The first group was lead users, which equaled respondents who rated their

computer skills as 10 on a scale from 1 to 10. These respondents formed 22%

(n=20) of the total sample, 93 respondents. As a contrast, the respondents who

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rated their computer skills the lowest, from 4 to 7, represented normal users. They

equaled 26% (n=24) of the total sample. No respondent rated own skills lower than

4. The rest of the respondents, with skills rated as 8 or 9, were left out of this

comparison, because they would most likely include both normal audience and lead

users, and thus, finding differences would be more difficult. According to the used

samples, 70 percent (n=14) of the lead users reported using social media in their

work, whereas only 20 percent (n=5) of the normal audience used them. Also, 80

percent (n=16) of the lead users told they would submit their idea to an idea

marketplace when only 38 percent (n=9) of the normal audience said they would.

These statistics confirm the assumption that the most skilled computer users

would represent the lead users and the least skilled computer users would

represent the normal users. As a contrast, only one respondent did not use social

media on free time, so that question could not be used as a differentiator.

In total, 68 percent (n=64) of all the respondents told that they would submit an

idea to an idea marketplace if they had an idea. They were asked to describe

motivators for the submission in a free text box in order to find some new

motivators that were not asked later on in the survey, but there were not any. The

most often mentioned particular answer was seeing ideas coming real and being

heard.

According to the results, the most effective marketing channel was a suggestion by

a friend (74%, n=70) and social media (71%, n=67) versus traditional media, as

they got most votes when asking which channel would make one go to see the Idea

Marketplace. Interestingly, Facebook application that shows ideas by your friends

was the most unpopular option (10%, n=9).

As it was expected, people were interested in tasks that were least demanding.

Reading other ideas was the most popular task (81%, n=76), then voting for other

ideas (70%, n=66), followed by commenting other ideas (49%, n=46). 12 percent

(n=11) were interested in organizing their own idea challenges or creating demos,

prototypes or business plans of ideas. Surprisingly, only 11 percent (n=10) were

interested in browsing other users, and no more than 7 percent (n=7) wanted to

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become friends with other users. When asked why one would not participate in any

of these activities, the responds mentioned the lack of time, incentives and interest

for the topic. Two respondents did not believe that ideas would actually be

executed.

Table 8 summarizes the responses to the last three questions of the survey, which

actually verified the validity of motivations that had been identified in the literature

review in the idea crowdsourcing context. Respondents were asked which of the

listed motivations would motivate them to participate in the Idea Marketplace for

the first time and regularly and which of them would motivate participants to make

demonstration. The second column (f1) shows the quantity of responses in

numbers and the third (f2) in percentages when asking about participating for the

first time. The fourth (r1) and fifth (r2) columns represent the popularity of each

motivator when asking about regular participation, and the sixth (d1) and seventh

(d2) columns show the willingness for making demonstrations of ideas. Difference

1 (D1) describes the difference between motivations to participate for the first time

and regularly per motivator. Difference 2 (D2) calculates the difference between

participating for the first time and making demos for each motivator. The five most

popular motivators and biggest differences have been highlighted in red.

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Table 8 Motivations to participate in the Idea Marketplace

Which of the following would motivate you to participate...

…for the first time

…regularly ...making demos

Difference 1 |r2-f2|

Difference 2 |d2-f2|

f1 f2 r1 r2 d1 d2 D1 D2

Getting a little amount of money from each activity

22 23% 35 37% 21 22% 14% 1%

Chance of winning a lot of money if my idea/demo wins

26 28% 14 15% 14 15% 13% 13%

Chance of winning a new mobile phone or other technical device

27 29% 12 13% 11 12% 16% 17%

Chance of winning a free trip to the space museum in Moscow

12 13% 4 4% 3 3% 9% 10%

Care for community 8 9% 9 10% 1 1% 1% 8%

Getting new friends 8 9% 13 14% 2 2% 5% 7%

Sense of community and similarity

3 3% 7 7% 2 2% 4% 1%

Sense of cooperation 6 6% 7 7% 6 6% 1% 0%

Knowledge exchange 30 32% 29 31% 13 14% 1% 18%

Personal learning 27 29% 28 30% 21 22% 1% 7%

Intellectual stimulations 30 32% 19 20% 19 20% 12% 12%

New viewpoints and synergy 22 23% 17 18% 9 10% 5% 13%

Firm recognition 6 6% 4 4% 4 4% 2% 2%

Peer recognition 8 9% 6 6% 1 1% 3% 8%

Enhancement of professional status

7 7% 4 4% 8 9% 3% 2%

Winning and competition 9 10% 2 2% 2 2% 8% 8%

Altruism 6 6% 4 4% 1 1% 2% 5%

Enjoyment and fun 24 26% 19 20% 8 9% 6% 17%

Ideology 5 5% 2 2% 0 0% 3% 5%

Reciprocity 4 4% 1 1% 1 1% 3% 3%

Interesting objectives 3 3% 5 5% 7 7% 2% 4%

Sense of obligation to contribute 2 2% 2 2% 2 2% 0% 0%

Chance of winning a lunch with CEO

2 2% 2 2% 1 1% 0% 1%

Chance of winning a paid day off

4 4% 1 1% 1 1% 3% 3%

Making better products/services 35 37% 18 19% 14 15% 18% 22%

Seeing own ideas come true 37 39% 26 28% 19 20% 11% 19%

Improving living conditions through new products

7 7% 5 5% 3 3% 2% 4%

Having interfaces to something I can't get from anywhere else

2 2% 2%

Getting cool tools for creating demos

7 7% 7%

Getting so simple tools that anyone can use them

5 5% 5%

Nothing 1 1% 5 5% 10 11% 4% 10%

Other 1 1% 1 1% 2 2% 0% 1%

Table 8 shows that respondents were most motivated by seeing their ideas come

true. This made it to the top 5 in each of the alternative ways of participating.

Personal learning and intellectual stimulations were also popular in each of them.

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Knowledge exchange was popular in first-time and regular participation, but the

popularity decreased rapidly when creating demonstration. Interestingly, making

better products and services was the second most popular motivator in first-time

participation but not even close that popular in regular participation. For making

demonstrations, it was one of the top motivators again. Basically this makes sense

in the light of the results of the observation: Normal users come to the site having

some particular enhancement idea in mind, when lead users come to the site to

spend time, although their fundamental goal might still be to make better products

and services.

As a contrast for these intrinsic motivators, some monetary rewards were rated

high as well. For the first-time participation, winning a mobile phone was one of the

top five motivators having the same score than personal learning. Chance of

winning a lot of money, if one’s idea wins, was almost as popular, whereas getting a

little amount of money from each activity was not that motivating. However, in

regular participation it was the most popular motivator, which is reasonable

because considering the repeating nature of this activity. Instead, the popularity of

a change of winning a lot of money decreased rapidly in regular participation. This

type of activity included also enjoyment and fun as one of the main motivators.

Enjoyment and fun was obviously not considered as a realistic motivator when it

came to making demos. The mentioned motivators repeated when asking about

making demos.

9.2.1 Motivators of lead users versus normal users

Tables 9 and 10 presents the results of the survey and compares the popularity of

the motivators between normal users and lead users. There are both similarities

and differences. When discussing first-time participation, winning a mobile phone

or other technical device motivated normal users the most, but lead users were

most motivated by intellectual stimulations. Lead users were also motivated by

personal learning as well as enjoyment and fun, whereas normal users preferred

knowledge exchange and making better products and services. It is, to some extent,

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surprising that these motivators motivated especially normal users. On the other

hand, both scored relatively high among lead users’ preferences as well. On the

contrary, personal learning, intellectual stimulations and enjoyment and fun were

among the most differently rated motivators. Both groups were motivated by

seeing own ideas come true and a change of getting a lot of money if one’s idea

wins.

Table 9 Comparing top 5 motivations of lead users and normal users

Lead users Normal users

1 Intellectual stimulations Chance of getting a new mobile phone or other technical device

2 Personal learning Making better products/services

3 Seeing own ideas come true Chance of getting a lot of money if my idea wins

4 Enjoyment and fun Seeing own ideas come true

5 Chance of getting a lot of money if my idea wins

Knowledge exchange

In regular participation, both groups agreed that getting money from each activity

would be motivating. Knowledge exchange, personal learning and finding new

viewpoints and synergy were also found among the top motivators of both.

However, lead users still rated intellectual stimulations the highest, while they did

not interest normal users. Making better products and services was again included

in the most motivating factors for normal users.

Making demos was most motivated by the same motivators than already

mentioned, but in addition, enhancement of professional status got to the top five

for lead users, and 29 percent of normal users told that “nothing” would motivate

them to make demos.

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Table 10 Comparing motivators of lead users and normal users

Motivator First-time participation Regular participation Making demos

Lead users Normal users

Change Lead users

Normal users

Change Lead users Normal users

Change

Getting little amount of money from each activity 3 15% 7 29% 14% 6 30% 12 50% 20% 3 15% 7 29% 14%

Chance of getting a lot of money if my idea wins 6 30% 9 38% 8% 4 20% 5 21% 1% 6 30% 3 13% 17%

Chance of getting a new mobile phone or other technical device 5 25% 12 50% 25% 3 15% 5 21% 6% 2 10% 3 13% 3%

Care for community 3 15% 4 17% 2% 4 20% 1 4% 16% 1 5% 0 0% 5%

Getting new friends 3 15% 1 4% 11% 5 25% 2 8% 17% 1 5% 0 0% 5%

Feeling of togetherness 0 0% 1 4% 4% 0 0% 1 4% 4% 0 0% 1 4% 4%

Chance of getting a free trip to the space museum in Moscow 3 15% 3 13% 2% 1 5% 1 4% 1% 0 0% 1 4% 4%

Cooperation with others 1 5% 0 0% 5% 3 15% 0 0% 15% 1 5% 1 4% 1%

Knowledge exchange 5 25% 8 33% 8% 8 40% 6 25% 15% 2 10% 4 17% 7%

Personal learning 9 45% 6 25% 20% 10 50% 6 25% 25% 4 20% 2 8% 12%

Intellectual stimulations 10 50% 4 17% 33% 10 50% 3 13% 37% 6 30% 1 4% 26%

New viewpoints and synergy 6 30% 4 17% 13% 6 30% 5 21% 9% 2 10% 1 4% 6%

Employer recognition 1 5% 0 0% 5% 2 10% 1 4% 6% 2 10% 2 8% 2%

Peer recognition 4 20% 1 4% 16% 4 20% 0 0% 20% 1 5% 0 0% 5%

Enhancement of professional status 1 5% 2 8% 3% 1 5% 1 4% 1% 4 20% 0 0% 20%

Winning and competing 0 0% 2 8% 8% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 1 5% 1 4% 1%

Altruism, charity 2 10% 0 0% 10% 1 5% 0 0% 5% 0 0% 0 0% 0%

Enjoyment and fun 8 40% 3 13% 27% 5 25% 2 8% 17% 6 30% 1 4% 26%

Ideology 1 5% 1 4% 1% 1 5% 1 4% 1% 0 0% 0 0% 0%

Reciprocity 1 5% 1 4% 1% 1 5% 0 0% 5% 0 0% 1 4% 4%

Interesting challenges 1 5% 1 4% 1% 2 10% 2 8% 2% 2 10% 1 4% 6%

Sense of obligation to contribute 0 0% 1 4% 4% 0 0% 1 4% 4% 1 5% 0 0% 5%

Chance of winning a paid day off 1 5% 2 8% 3% 0 0% 1 4% 4% 0 0% 0 0% 0%

Chance of winning something you would not otherwise get 3 15% 15% 0 0% 0% 0 0% 0%

Chance of winning a lunch with CEO 0 0% 1 4% 4% 1 4% 4% 0 0% 0%

Making better products/services 4 20% 11 46% 26% 1 5% 5 21% 16% 2 10% 4 17% 7%

Seeing own ideas come true 9 45% 9 38% 7% 5 25% 6 25% 0% 5 25% 5 21% 4%

Improving your own living conditions through new products 1 5% 1 4% 1% 2 10% 1 4% 6% 0 0% 0 0% 0%

Improving others living conditions through new products 0 0% 0 0 0% 1 5% 5% 2 10% 10%

Passing time 3 15% 0 0 15% 1 5% 5% 1 5% 5%

Having interfaces to something I can't get from anywhere else (e.g. location data)

2 8% 8%

Getting cool tools for creating demos 0 0% 0 0% 0%

Getting so simple tools that even non-programmer can use them 3 15% 1 4% 11%

Nothing 0 0% 1 4% 4% 1 5% 3 13% 8% 2 10% 7 29% 19%

Other 0 0% 1 4% 4% 0 0% 0 0% 0% 1 5% 0 0% 5%

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9.3 Interview results

17 internal and external experts were interviewed mainly to find out what kind of

features the Idea Marketplace should have (chapter 9.3.4). However, interviews

also complemented the results regarding motivations to participate in idea creation

in the Idea Marketplace (chapter 9.3.2) and roles of users in the Idea Marketplace

(chapter 9.3.3). Interviews also touched the overall concept of the Idea Marketplace

(chapter 9.3.1).

9.3.1 Concept of the Idea Marketplace

Soon after the first interviews it became clear that there is no consensus on the

concept of the Idea Marketplace, not even on its main purpose. Four competing

concepts were presented. The first one was a place for ideas; the second one was

related to the first concept and suggested the Idea Marketplace to act as a channel

to test ideas. The third one claimed that the Idea Marketplace is not a realistic way

to get real innovations, but rather a marketing trick. The fourth proposal presented

that the Idea Marketplace should act as a consolidated change log and a channel to

communicate the product development decisions for consumers.

Several interviews touched also the theme of internal stakeholders that are

operating in the field of innovations and product development.

9.3.1.1 The Idea Marketplace as a place for ideas

Only one interviewee actually believed that the Company could get real innovations

out of the Idea Marketplace. He reminded that in this case, the Idea Marketplace

should become like InnoCentive of the mobile industry, which does not yet exist, as

InnoCentive concentrates only on pharmacy and chemistry (InnoCentive, Inc.,

2010). In his vision, the Idea Marketplace would be a platform for a professional

network of universities, research centers and experts who could solve, for money,

any problem that companies have not been able to solve. Another interviewee was

considering this option as well, but found it unrealistic, as to be able to produce real

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innovations, the Idea Marketplace would need support from the whole company,

including CEO. It would also have an effect on the functions of the whole the

Company.

9.3.1.2 The Idea Marketplace as a place to test ideas

One interviewee believed that the Idea Marketplace would best serve as a place to

validate trends, test ideas and prioritize them. It would also offer information about

preferences of different segments – it is no use to produce wlan phones for senior

citizens in Asia even if some people request them.

9.3.1.3 The Idea Marketplace as a marketing tool

The most popular approach was that the Idea Marketplace would be only a tool for

marketing to show customers that The Company’s employees are listening.

According to this view, this kind of service is more related to My Starbucks Idea

(Starbucks Corporation, 2010) or Idea Storm (Dell, 2010), which are fully

marketing or PR activities, than InnoCentive. In general, these places do not

produce feasible innovations, but rather only little bits of ideas. One interviewee

gave an example of Starbucks, where only one idea out of thousands has actually

reached R&D. Two interviewees had heard the same story about IdeaStorm,

according to which a popular idea about booklet was implemented, but withdrawn

just a month later because no one bought it. Another interviewee concluded that

normal consumers are not as innovative as professionals and they do not

necessarily know what they want. And if they had a really good idea, they would

probably not tell it in a public forum.

One interviewee reminded that not even 400 implemented ideas out of 10,000

necessary satisfy consumers. They will find it ridiculous that 9,600 ideas are

considered to be rubbish. That’s why, according to him, it would be better to

concentrate on listening and marketing than trying to get real innovations. One

challenge would be to communicate to audience what is to be expected and what is

realistic.

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9.3.1.4 The Idea Marketplace as a communication channel

The last concept suggested remarkably differs from the others, but it is rather part

of the solution, not the whole concept: According to one interviewee, the Idea

Marketplace should be a place to communicate decisions and thus, end long

conversations about missing features. According to him, these conversations are

being had in discussions forums, where bug reports, decisions and promises are

not structured. The Idea Marketplace could instead collect these issues to a

transparent change log, which would communicate what the Company will fix for

the next release. Many traditional IT companies have this kind of public logs for

bugs and releases where the bug will be fixed, but the Company does not. That

leads to endless conversations as the Company’s employees do not dare to publicly

promise anything. On the other hand, the Idea Marketplace would also serve as a

source of information. Decision makers could partially base their decisions on the

number of votes. For instance, if the sales unit has generally believed that

producing maps for N900 is not profitable, they could re-estimate this based on the

number of votes the idea gets. Another problem has been the amount of data.

According to the interviewee, there has been so much feedback that it has been

impossible to prioritize it. Voting system would offer a solution for that.

A related theme that arouse from interviews was the nature of ideas. Interviewees

felt that complains, requests and feedback in general are a good source of ideas,

and they can even be innovations as such. In some cases, the Company has just not

thought of bringing some existing service to its own context. Thus, old ideas can

become innovations.

9.3.1.5 Cooperation with internal stakeholders of the Idea Marketplace

The second sub-theme was cooperation with the most important internal

stakeholders and the Company’s related platforms, Backstage, Betalabs,

IdeasProject, Nokia Care, Comms, Forum the Company, Digital Marketing, and

discussion forums.

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One interviewee thought that the Company should not build another community,

when Backstage and Betalabs already exist, but it should rather concentrate on

removing existing barriers and developing Betalabs further, for instance, by

providing appealing mobile interfaces for developers. He also reminded that even if

a new platform is built, Betalabs should not be forgotten, as it represents a more

challenging stage in the innovation process compared to submitting “raw” ideas.

Another interviewee claimed that IdeasProject, the Company’s existing external

idea crowdsourcing site with external experts, should definitely be a part of the

future the Idea Marketplace and one source for ideas. Ideas by IdeasProject could

be tested in the Idea Marketplace, while it would also provide some valuable future

scenarios and trend for others to use in the Idea Marketplace.

Three interviewees pointed out the cooperation with Forum Nokia, the Company’s

website for developers. One saw that the Company could this way bring developers

and consumers together. Another one claimed that the Company has failed in

creating a developer community, which is desperately needed to implement all the

application related ideas. The Company is basically not a services provider but

enabler, so a third party is needed. Otherwise, users of the Idea Marketplace get

frustrated, if for instance Foursquare application for the Company’s phone will get

500 votes. According to the same interviewee, votes in the Idea Marketplace can

motivate developers to develop some application they would otherwise not

bothered to implement for the Company. The third interviewee brought up that

most ideators do not most likely know how to implement their application ideas,

and therefore, it would be beneficial to work in cooperation with a developer

already from the beginning. Furthermore, developers do not want to be treated as

“brainless machines” who just program what others tell them to. They have to feel

they do it freely. On the other hand, ideas should already be rather feasible when

including a developer to the process, but then take it further together.

Nokia Care is basically responsible for online support for customers in technical

problems, but Nokia Care is also doing customer satisfaction surveys and analyses.

It is partially providing support via discussion forums, but mainly this is done

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through contact centers and physical service points, where agents solve problems

and report all of them. A product quality team analyzes the reports of problems.

Sometimes problems include also ideas or suggestions, but they are not utilized

because there has not been a channel for these ideas. The interviewee believes that

the Idea Marketplace would be a natural place for these ideas. Another interviewee

had heard that only some part of this information is going somewhere, when it

could give valuable knowledge about trends and even innovations when utilized

properly.

According to one interviewee, ideas are also submitted to Facebook. Consumers are

even sketching visuals of phones, but they are not used. Same applies with idea

campaigns by Comms, the Company’s communication unit. The interviewee

claimed that these ideas could be collected to the Idea Marketplace accordingly.

An interviewee thought that the Idea Marketplace is mainly a marketing site for

branding purposes but felt that a new site as such is not needed at all, because

Facebook is already harnessed for that.

One interviewee was worried that the Idea Marketplace will get poisoned by the

negative feedback that is submitted besides ideas. He says that discussion forums

are already a place for that kind of collaboration and they have even a round-the-

clock moderation to calm down the most furious feedback givers.

To conclude, making the Idea Marketplace really a source of innovation will be

challenging, but simple marketing trick wouldn’t answer to the Company’s need of

user-originated ideas. However, positive image is an advantage, which should be

utilized even if the main focus is on ideas. Also the idea of using the Idea

Marketplace to communicate decisions regarding new products should be

considered, as it’s a part of feedback, which has really important role.

9.3.2 Motivations

The following motivations were identified in the interviews, the number of

respondents suggesting the theme indicated in parentheses. “Employees” refers to

motivations of the Company’s employees when using the Idea Marketplace, and

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“Developers” stands for motivations of developers to developing applications for

the Company:

Financial motivators (11) Money (9) Job opportunities (2) Social reasons (11) Networking (4) Collaboration (3) Getting feedback (2) Reciprocity in general (1) Controlling the community (1) Recognition (10) Recognition in general (2) Peer recognition (2) Ego (2) Company recognition (1) Publicity (1) Getting attention from the Company (1) Getting new rights to the service (1) Self-actualization (10) Challenges (2) Learning (2) Self-fulfillment (1) Want to be a part of new things (1) Generation Mind Set (1) Frustration (1) Creating new (1) Spending time (1) Charity (7) Theme is ethically, politically or religiously important (3) Altruism (2) Helping others and their living conditions (2) Ideas coming real (7) Cannot implement the idea alone (5)

Money for implementation (1) Pride for the idea (1) Helping the Company (5) Desire to help (3) Being a fan (2) Uniqueness (2) Access to unique interfaces (2) Employees (7) Obligation (2) Desire to improve products (1) Knowledge about the future (1) Knowledge about the needs of customers (1) Getting ideas and feedback (1) Frustration (1) Helping others (1) Developers Money (1) Fame (1) Recognition (1) Fun and “coolness” (1) Community spirit (1

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Some of the themes need clarification. First of all, money was mentioned mainly in

a negative context. Interviewees explained that money might corrupt the

atmosphere of the community and confuse motivations. In general, interviewees

assumed that money could motivate normal users, who have a lot of time, to submit

their normal ideas, but not lead users to share their innovative ideas, unless the

amount of money is remarkable. If an idea fetched 1 billion for the Company, one

million for the inventor is reasonable, but there needs to be a different channel for

that kind of ideas.

However, even normal users may not accept small rewards. One notion was that

giving little amounts of money might look like exhaustion, as the following

interviewee describes:

“Nokia wants to take all our ideas and give something like 500 [euros] in return.”

As to recognition, peer recognition was seen as a strong motivator, but presuming

the community. An interviewee says:

“If your community is the whole internet, in whose opinion you have the fame? It’s

missing.”

This quotation refers to the fact that the Idea Marketplace is targeted to everyone.

However, one interviewee points out that users might bring their ideas from the

Idea Marketplace to their own community via social media to get respect, which

would also promote the service. Another interviewee referred to the same group of

people who are mainly interested in enhancing their own ego. Third interviewee

claimed that after all, everyone is interested in giving the best possible image, no

one just says it aloud.

According to an interviewee, the Idea Marketplace enables new kind of company

recognition, or rather a channel for employees on the bottom of the hierarchy to

become recognized.

Getting feedback was also one popular theme, but it seems that getting feedback

belongs rather under recognition theme than social motivations. One interviewee

took an example about sketching:

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“You have contributed and thought about it… and when it comes back with a sketch

made by some real designer of the Company, like it could be like this or that, you’ll be

like wow. That’s a lot, I claim that it’s a really big motivation. I was listened, I was

taken seriously, I made a difference.”

Regular feedback would also make people work more. If the process is iterative,

ideators who get through are motivated to work their ideas further as they know

their idea is promising and there are less competitors left in that stage.

As to collaboration, there was one point to mention. One interviewee questioned

the logic of creating a new community when the Internet is already full of existing

ones. He also reminded that creating a new community from a scratch is practically

impossible.

Of social motivators, networking was mentioned most often and especially in a

meaning of getting to know new people, not just keeping touch with old friends.

This, as well as getting feedback from others, was mentioned together with social

media, the features of which match very well with these needs. Interaction with the

community was also one of the few reasons identified to start using the Idea

Marketplace regularly.

Implementation of ideas was also a popular suggested motivator with several

shades. The most often mentioned one was the idea that an ideator would like to

use but is not able to implement himself. Money for implementation means that

ideator will win a lot of money, but not for himself but to be invested in

implementing the idea.

Self-actualization includes several needs from the top of the hierarchy of needs by

Maslow (1943), such as learning and self-fulfillment.

The last one of the larger themes was the motivation to help the Company

because of some old, emotional connection or being a fan.

Two interviewees also took the perspective of the Company’s employees and

imagined what would motivate them to do their own part, that is, go to the Idea

Marketplace, search for suitable ideas and take them into account when designing

new products. Both interviewees mentioned obligation - employees will be

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expected to participate. On the other hand, some employees might proactively want

to read consumers’ thoughts to be able to improve products. They may also get

signals of the future, or simply ideas and feedback to be able to act faster, produce

better products and thus, extra value for the customer.

One interviewee concentrated fully on the motivations of developers. He strongly

pointed out the significance of motivation – applications are made to make money.

Most developers are doing programming for living, either as entrepreneurs or

freelancers or in a software company. Thus, money is for them at least an

important hygiene factor, but they also actually dream about getting rich, as there

are some success story applications which have made their creators rich and

famous. This is why developers are rigorous when it comes to IPR and legal

matters. If there is a risk of losing some unknown share of the profit to the

Company or the original ideator, developers will not use the Idea Marketplace.

Instead, for instance promising 100 percent of the profit when getting an idea from

the Idea Marketplace could work as a motivator, as currently the Company takes 30

percent of profit of applications that are sold in Ovi Store. Other mentioned

motivators included recognition, for example, seeing own application in the

Company’s commercial. Moreover, developers want to do “cool” things, be the first

doing the “cool” thing and be part of the “coolest” communities.

As a summary, interviewees found money as a negative factor when trying to

motivate users to be innovative. Instead, recognition and giving feedback were

found important. Also motivations related to self-actualization were mentioned

often, but in different many forms. The Company’s employees were believed to

participate because it would benefit their job and developers would use the Idea

Marketplace if they can financially from it.

9.3.3 Roles

Roles that came up in interviews were really different from their nature than the

ones identified in the literature review. Interviewees defined roles based on the

activity of users or based on their role when working in projects, while some

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interviewees concentrated on roles that belonged to employees supporting end-

users. Thus, the roles raised from interviews were grouped into three categories:

community roles, project roles and supporting roles. Community roles refer to end-

users, project roles to roles that are needed when taking ideas further, and

supporting roles belong to Company’s employees who work for the Idea

Marketplace. These groups and their meanings are described in more detail as

follows. In addition to these roles, there is a separate group, developers, which

must be considered equally. Developers refer to group of people who have

technical skills, ability and will to develop applications and other software.

9.3.3.1 Community roles

According to interviewees, most of the roles identified from the literature are not

actual roles but rather behaviors. For instance, all the “real” roles can include many

of these behaviors, such as the “role” of partner, hero, expert or guide, according to

what is needed in the community. Or, as one interviewee put it, those kinds of roles

are not actual roles but just an embodiment of their motivation to participate, and

these “roles” are part of actual roles. Another interviewee expressed that roles are

actually the same thing as motivation:

“I am a facilitator, what motivates me? Well, facilitating, of course!”

According to the interviews, community roles include passive audience, normal

users and lead users. An interviewee explained that the most active 20 percent of

users, lead users, creates 80 percent of the content and the rest 20 percent is

created by the normal users, which is the majority. In addition there are “eye balls”,

the passive audience that does not leave any trace but only reads what others have

been writing.

Let us first discuss the normal users as a role. They submit some ideas, vote and

comment some ideas but are mainly just watching, reading and browsing, like the

passive audience. But this is beneficial as well, because their attention motivates

others to produce content. Even if some interviewees claimed that these users

might not be the most innovative ones, others reminded that they still represent a

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huge majority of the Company’s customers and therefore, their opinion is

extremely valuable when studying who is voting for what kind of features. That is

why it will also be important to get as versatile user base as possible. This is also

one point mentioned earlier – innovation arises from variety.

The smaller group, lead users, can be early adopters who have a lot of energy from

frustration towards nonfunctional products and want to solve problems and

challenges. They are worth searching, persuading and profiling even for some

special purposes. One interviewee suggested the Company’s fans could be turned

into lead users, but another one reminded that fans are mainly 20-40 year old

males, so that group is biased and needs another point of view as well. It was also

mentioned that this group must be steady; it cannot be changed for each challenge.

The group of lead users should also contain “brokers”, who connect people and

ideas. Experts, a role defined in the literature review but brought up in this context

too, are good at this because they see connections that other people necessarily do

not.

9.3.3.2 Project roles of users in the Idea Marketplace

Project roles was another category of roles, which could become relevant for the

Idea Marketplace when bringing ideas forward in teams of users. Also the

Company’s employees can adopt project roles.

Project roles are familiar from physical work environment and the roles are

implementer, ideator, inspirer, coach, project leader, and expert. Implementer is a

person who makes things happen instead of eternal planning. Ideator has a lot of

ideas, while inspirer inspires others. Coach is also an innovative person, but he

concentrates on challenging ideas and bringing new points of view. These people

are needed when taking radical actions. Project leader is a precise person, taking

the responsibility and driving the project forward. Project leaders and experts are

especially needed in effective non-usual projects. Experts know the field of current

project and are often interested in nothing but the subject matter. According to one

interviewee, it must be kept in mind that in one project, there cannot be two

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experts from the same field, otherwise they end up having a war since they are

really ambitious from their nature.

9.3.3.3 Supporting roles of users in the Idea Marketplace

Supporting roles include community facilitator, moderator, IT support, R&D team,

tester and catalyst. They should all be employees of the Company. Community

facilitator was mentioned most often. Community facilitator is an employee who

“looks after the site” by governing the structure, raising interesting content to the

main page, deciding who should be rewarded and considering if some users should

be given more rights. He is making the community more interesting by daily

bringing up new quality content by other users. As one interviewee put it:

“His role is to make sure that the community flourishes. He roots out weeds when

occurring, and when seeing beautiful flowers, he waters. He also outlines that this is a

pumpkin plantation, here are tomatoes, and it’s also ruling people, he’s more like a

social worker than technical employee.”

According to another interviewee, community facilitator may also include keeping

conversations on the right track and maybe taking off the old content and the

content people are not interested in. Popular content may also need to be taken off

in case it is old. Community facilitator can also give some advice for the new-

comers, such as “these are the comments you are most likely to receive, be ready for

them.”

Moderators are ensuring that the community behaves well. They take off

inappropriate content and, if it is repeated by someone, they contact the person,

and ban him, if he does not change his behavior.

IT support makes sure that the technical platform works. They can also add new

features and improve usability.

Testers simply test the functioning of the site and make sure it is working properly.

“R&D team” listens feedback, responses to it and takes suitable content to the

roadmap. In the case of the Idea Marketplace, this role is naturally not just for R&D

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but the whole organization or at least the so called “harvesters”. One interviewee

suggested that everyone should be watching ideas from his or her own area.

“Catalyst” refers to sponsors who can take the idea further to the actual

implementation.

9.3.3.4 Developers in the Idea Marketplace

Finally, developers form their very own group. They are not working for the

Company, but they are in a way a supporting role as they implement application

ideas. According to one interviewee, the profile of developers is moving from high-

tech more to the direction of a web designer. Along with the new easy-to-use

programming tools, almost anyone can do the technical part of application, but the

appearance will become even more essential.

9.3.3.5 Summary of roles in interviews

According to the interviewees, roles identified in the literature review are not roles

but behaviors of higher-level roles, which are few. These behaviors are still

valuable – they can be used to define what kinds of behaviors are needed in real

roles of an online community like the Idea Marketplace. Findings from chapter 9.1

also support this division, as users in Dell IdeaStorm were not just “greeters” or

“opinions providers”, but two separate user groups similar to normal users and

lead users were identified. Fewer roles are also more manageable in practice, if the

Company for instance wants to attract or activate certain roles. Figure 12 illustrates

the roles identified in interviews.

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Figure 12 Roles identified from interviews

9.3.4 Features of an idea marketplace

The conversation around features of an idea marketplace was versatile. The themes

mentioned most often were reward system, feedback, social media applications and

ability to work for an idea. Other occurred themes are also presented in the end of

this sub-chapter.

9.3.4.1 Ways to reward users in the Idea Marketplace

One obvious option for the reward system was scores that users will get from all

kind of contribution. Scores define the value of the user in the community. One

interviewee, however, reminded of the downsides of automated scores: it is almost

impossible to design the system no one can play. For instance, if one posts a

provocative comment or idea to the site, it will receive a lot of attention and thus

scores but does not necessarily provide any value for the community. Or one can

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systematically vote for all ideas or write a same comment to all ideas. Another

interviewee proposed replacing scores partially by human intelligence. This could

be done by promoting some trusted users to “VIPs” who score users and can

promote them to VIPs as well. On the other hand, a score system must still exist in

the background, because, according to one interviewee, it is always possible to miss

some active users who have been doing a lot for the community. Users could also

be promoted with “badges” or titles for some specific activity they tend to do, such

as “bug buster” or “innovator”. This approach was in use in Backstage, the

Company’s test environment for employees, but it got too complicated to maintain.

The interviewee, however, told that the reward system would have been possible

to maintain with better infrastructure. It is also good to have “the contributor of the

month” title, but the winner should change every month, even if the same person is

the most active in practice.

One interviewee proposed simply giving a phone every month for the contributor

of the month. This could also be done, for instance, by giving the phone for the

person whose idea is on the top at a certain moment, and counter would show the

time left. This approach would encourage the top ideators to promote their ideas

even more when the challenge is coming to its end. The interviewee also reminded

that users can be cheated only once – if you betray their trust, for instance, by

promising a reward and not delivering it, the word will spread and in worst case

destroy the whole service.

9.3.4.2 Feedback system for users

The perceptions on the feedback system varied a lot. No interviewee thought that

every individual idea should necessarily receive a reply, but it was agreed that

giving individual feedback instead of a standard message to as many users as

possible is valuable. In practice, two options were proposed by interviewees. The

first was hiring a couple of people writing the answers. Naturally, these people

could not know answers to all ideas, but they could act as brokers finding relevant

people and consulting them. Another option would be to harness all the Company’s

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employees giving feedback. That could be done, for instance, by linking the tags in

the Intranet describing the Company’s employees’ expertise and interests with idea

tags and sending notifications when matching ideas are submitted. That way, all the

Company’s employees would be posted about newest relevant ideas, and they

could quickly react. Some interviewees thought this would be a brilliant solution,

while others were skeptical. The main arguments by two interviewees against the

proposed solutions were that in reality the Company’s employees would not have

time to react to these notifications. That is, even if they were aware of the newest

ideas, they would not have time to implement them. On the other hand, one

interviewee argued that the Company’s employees should have time to browse and

implement ideas because it is their job to be interested in ideas related to their job.

Fourth one recommended that the Company’s employees could order notification

with desired tags and they could recommend tags as well as particular ideas to

other the employees via the system.

Another interviewee brought up a worry about managing the feedback policy.

According to him, not all the employees of the Company should talk to end-users

because they might promise too much or say something incorrect. The tone of voice

is extremely important. One cannot, for instance, say “thank you, we don’t need any

more information about this matter”, but you need to say that the bug is noted and

tell who is taking care of it. Moreover, the feedback cannot always be the same

”thank you, we will look in to this, we will investigate, this is very interesting” because

people will notice very soon if everyone else will get the same feedback – even if it

is true. One option would be to find such a big group of voluntary employees that it

represents the whole organization. One interviewee proposed that volunteers

could be chosen separately for each challenge so that the topic of challenge is

related to the job of the volunteer and she or he will include it to her or his job

targets to reserve enough time and also get some compensation for the time spent.

According to this interviewee, having a changing group of volunteers is beneficial

also because a fixed group of people cannot know everything. These people would

be trained on how to talk with end-users. Still, the challenge would be to find these

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volunteers, because they need to be in high enough position to be able to make

decisions regarding questions, and these people are usually the busiest. One

interviewee took the idea even further and proposed that the Company’s designers

should give the feedback for the most promising ideas in a form of real sketches.

That would be really impressive for the submitter and also motivate others. It also

helps to test the idea and communicate if it has been understood correctly.

In addition to giving feedback right after the idea is submitted, ideators should be

informed of the implementation of the idea – did anything ever happen or is the

idea going to be realized in the next release. This could be taken further by making

a few profound reports about what actually happened to some implemented ideas,

who was involved, and what stages were included. Users who have liked or

commented an idea could also get an automatic notification when the idea has been

implemented and information on where to purchase the new service or product in

question.

One type of feedback is, of course, the feedback users give to each other. One

interviewed social media expert reminded about “rich get richer” dilemma, which

often follows top lists. That is, users vote more for the ideas that have already made

it to the top ten. According to him, this is not a reliable way to rate ideas, but

instead, he suggested “hot or not” feature, where users compare two random ideas.

Then all the ideas will get views, and moreover, the popularity of an idea can be

counted based on the ratio between views and votes. In addition, he recommended

keeping the negative voting option, but when voting down, user should specify the

reason in the comment field. This would give the ideator constructive feedback

instead of leaving him wondering what is wrong with the idea. Finally, the

interviewee described an innovative way to rate ideas with sliders of various

criteria. Instead of giving thumbs up or down, a user can rate for instance the social

value or radicality of it. He gave an example of a virtual tea shop, where users could

see the other products they had rated as a reference when rating new flavors.

To conclude, the feedback should consist of automatic scores and badges combined

with human intelligence as well as feedback given by the Company’s employees. Of

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proposed alternatives, having a separate group of feedback givers for each

challenge sounded most functional when feedback givers are reserved in

beforehand and they get compensation.

9.3.4.3 Social media features

The interviews dealt also broadly with Facebook and other social media

applications. One must-have feature of the Idea Marketplace was a Facebook login

so that people do not need to create “yet another” account for the Idea Marketplace.

Another obvious feature was a Facebook application to “like”, share and

recommend ideas in Facebook. “Liking” refers to a feature which enables users to

show they like some idea by voting it. This would remind people about the

existence of the Idea Marketplace, and Facebook could even be the channel to send

notifications about updates of the Idea Marketplace. Notification could also be sent

to users’ emails. The application should immediately show which of one’s Facebook

friends are online and one should not need to add the same people as “friends”

again. But in addition, there should be a possibility to network with new people as

well. The Idea Marketplace could, for instance, recommend people with similar

ideas or interests. The Idea Marketplace could also tell the location of users and

thus enable real-life networking. However, the interaction in the system should

remain professional and be idea related instead of filling streams with “how are

you” kind of messages.

Naturally, Facebook is not the only possible social media. People could add their

ideas to their own blogs, website, Twitter, LinkedIn or other social media

applications. Or the other way around, one could bring in own content from other

sites, such as SlideShare or Flickr. Social networks are also important from the

developer point of view, as developers rather work on ideas by their fellows than

strangers.

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9.3.4.4 Collaboration functions

Naturally, people should be able to take ideas further in the Idea Marketplace in

addition to just submitting new ideas. There should be some kind of space to store

documents, manage project and collaborate. One interviewee recommended

scouting collaboration tools by, for instance, Microsoft, for future development. An

expert from collaboration field said that some basic functions would include co-

editing documents in real time and having virtual meetings, at least having real

time conversations. The team must be able to co-operate on the idea and agree on

checkpoints. However, according to him, there is no need to implement these

features in the Idea Marketplace, but ideators can very well use also external tools

they have gotten used to and have access to.

Another suggested theme was innovation methods, such as Six Thinking Hats by

Edward de Bono. An idea of crowdsourcing prototype production using microtask

approach was also tested with interviewees, and it was found interesting, but

interviewees were concerned that some users who would get 5 euros for producing

a demo of a good idea would sell it for 5,000 euros to the Company’s competitors.

By microtask, an interviewee referred to work that can be split into small simple

“micro” tasks and deliver all over the world via the Internet to be performed. The

representative from R&D hoped that ideators would be offered tools to make

demos and storyboards, which are kind of cartoons, from their ideas. She proposed

that, for instance, a browser version of the Company’s new software development

tool kits could be provided instead of tools that one needs to download to one’s

own computer. These tools can be used to program even real applications but also

demos of more complicating software.

9.3.4.5 Other themes

Other themes brought up by interviewees included submitting ideas in an

“appealing” format, rating ideas by their relevance in addition to innovativeness,

grouping users into teams, making content current, streams, notifications,

modification, usernames, segmentation and the easiness of use.

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By an “appealing format”, an interviewee meant setting a desired format for the

ideas, which would be the most suitable. There could, for example, be a character

limit to avoid long and exhausting description, or adding a picture could be

compulsory. Submitting the title of an idea in an epic format was also proposed.

Epic answers to questions “who does what for what reason”. For instance, “as a

driver I want to get SMS notifications and read messages in my car safely without

needing to pull over”. This would force the submitter to think the benefit as well.

Other needed information beneficial for decision makers and implementers is

“functional and emotional elements”. Functional elements include utility and

usability, while emotional elements include social value and enjoyment. According

to one interviewee, often only usability is thought and enjoyment totally forgotten.

The idea submission form should include questions that force to cover these

aspects too.

“Grouping” was discussed from two angles. First, an interviewee reminded that

teams collaborating on ideas would benefit greatly from a designer, because a nice

appearance can sometimes even make a bad idea look better than good, and good

ideas looking really good. In addition, users could be profiled according to team

types introduced in the chapter 9.3.3 and grouped based on them.

According to one marketing-oriented interviewee, the content should be made

topical to make it interesting, but that is taken care of as the ideas are mainly

gathered challenge-based. Another interviewee added that the content should be

really dynamic at least on the main page. New interesting content should be

highlighted continuously, as well as all the demos, sketches and other rare content

which would otherwise get lost in the huge pool of ideas. It would show that ideas

are actually taken further.

Segmentation referred to getting background information about users, which could

be used in marketing to target certain products to certain user group.

Furthermore, it was reminded that the service should be easy and clear to use. One

interviewee emphasized that the site should not be based on Flash and other good-

looking but dysfunctional elements. It should rather be simple and work fast.

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According to him, this has been the latest trend in Silicon Valley, for instance

Facebook, Twitter and Digg.it are all box-like and plain. Filtering the noise out of

relevant content is one element here. Developers also need their own filter to easily

find application ideas.

One interviewee also covered “gaming” fairly. He proposed using virtual money

which could be invested in promising ideas. If the idea gets successful, one will get

ones money back. This approach makes using the system exciting, playful and fun.

One option is to give “super diamond user” badges to distinguished users.

Finally, user names were mentioned. The web presence is extremely important for

technical people. They might be known best by their web nick name, and thus, they

should be able to keep it. However, the real name should be visible at least for the

moderator to enable controlling the site.

9.4 Synthesis of the Case Study

Figures 13a and 13b synthesize the whole Part III: Use Case Study. In Part III

consisted on three chapters. On chapter 9.1, two main roles were identified, the

first being “normal users” and the second named as “lead users”. Chapter 9.2

utilized motivations identified in the literature review and asked the respondents

which of them they would be motivated by. Responds of lead users and normal

users were compared, and the main motivators of both, as well as the biggest

motivational differences, were discovered. Finally, chapter 9.3, presented a group

of features and functionalities that the Idea Marketplace should have.

Motivations and roles were easily combined to Figure 13 based on of the results of

the survey. The background questions revealed the role of each respondent, either

normal user or lead user, and thus it was possible to compare the motivations of

both.

However, coupling motivations with features was more ambiguous. The researcher

was forced to use her intuition and tacit knowledge to combine these two. On the

other hand, these connections are also of common sense, for instance, of the

presented alternatives, getting feedback from the Company falls under company

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recognition. Motivations identified in the literature review and the survey results

were compiled with motivations by interviewees. In addition, interviews brought

up some “supporting roles” that were linked to suitable motivations. Finally, the

whole synthesis was validated by the last interviewee who is the co-founder and

CEO of a Finnish social media start-up. She also recommended adding a few details

to the synthesis, which were then embedded accordingly to results as well.

Figure 13 illustrating the synthesis consists of three shapes – a rectangle with

rounded corners stands for a motivator, a right-angled rectangle represents a

feature, and an oval refers to a supporting role. Main roles, lead users and normal

users, are illustrated using different shades of gray, dark for lead users and light for

normal users. Middle gray refers to motivators by interviewees that were not

assigned to either of the groups. Colors were also used to group related motivators

together. Colored rectangles with rounded corners describe the theme of the group

and the according color recurs in lines of each motivator, feature and role that

belong to the group in question. The main themes are social reasons, self-

actualization, recognition, financial motivators, ideas coming real, charity, and

helping the Company. Arrows point out which elements belong together. Numbers

in arrows refer to the number of occurrence of the motivation in question.

The objective of the Figure 13 is to link all studied elements together and illustrate

the connections between them. It acts as a map which tells in one view which are

the most important motivators, and what roles are motivated by which

motivations. The size of the motivation rectangle implies the importance of the

motivation. When looking into it more carefully one can find ways to implement

these motivations in an idea marketplace. For instance, when social reasons are

wanted, related features tell what functionalities are needed in the site: browsing

and following people, commenting, recommending, seeing location and being able

to share in social media. When especially lead users are wanted to the site, one can

concentrate on motivations on dark grey and related features instead of light grey

motivations. Rounded shapes even tell what supporting roles are needed to

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implement succesfully wanted features and motivations. For instance, company

recognition needs three supporting roles, harvesters, community manager and the

Company’s employees to happen.

All roles, motivations and features are described in more detail earlier in this study.

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Figure 13a Synthesis of the Use Case Study

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Figure 14b Synthesis of the Use Case Study

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PART IV: DISCUSSION

This study was made for the Company to support the design and implementation

process of the new Idea Marketplace that is to be launched in spring 2011.

The research question of the study was “How to get organizations’ employees,

customers and other stakeholders to use the new idea marketplace to support the

idea creation process?” and it was divided into following sub-questions:

- What motivates people to contribute to an idea marketplace?

- What features should an idea marketplace have?

- What kind of roles do the users of an idea marketplace have?

All of the research questions were answered. The literature review offered a list of

motivations to be validated empirically in idea creation context. This was studied

by interviewing experts and analyzing survey results of 93 respondents. It

appeared that the same motivators motivate users to participate in an idea

marketplace as any other online community, but the significance of feedback was

emphasized by the interviewees, while the importance of money as a motivation

remained unclear. Based on the survey, monetary rewards are motivating users

when interviews didn’t believe in motivating impact of money and goods.

Basic functions were covered in the literature review, but the interviews

concretized them to actual features and thus linked tightly to motivators. Features

enable motivators, but on the other hand, the corresponding motivator motivates

using the feature. Some features are linked to two motivators instead of one. The

synthesis presented the recommended features.

The literature review specified 55 separate roles, which were eventually cut down

into two user groups, normal users and lead users, and a few supporting roles. The

main finding regarding roles was that the normal users have usually some specific

agenda in mind when coming to an idea marketplace, and the agenda is always not

purely to innovate but also to give some general feedback. The other role, lead

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users, instead, comes to the site just to spend some time. The role changes from a

normal user to a lead user very clearly after only a few posts. Motivational

differences between these two groups were also discovered.

The objectives of the thesis were as follows:

- To identify the known motivations, features and roles of online communities

from the literature,

- to validate the identified motivations, features and roles in the context of idea

crowdsourcing and to complete them with findings from end-user survey,

observation and expert interviews, and

- to provide recommendations on how to build a new idea marketplace that will

attract a high variety of consumers globally

The first objective was completed with regard to separate issues, but all elements

were so unconnected that structuring any synthesis in that point was impossible.

Instead, the synthesis was built in the end, once the results from the empirical

study had been included. The second objective was also reached, possible

differentiators being the feedback process and transparency of the implementation

process of ideas and the strong role of community facilitator. Furthermore, the

third objective was covered in the synthesis part of the study.

When comparing the results with the literature review, the following observations

can be made. All the motivators to work and act in general online communities

were identified in the case study as well; therefore, they apply to a context of idea

marketplace as well. However, some of these motivators were mentioned in the

survey only one or two times, and therefore, all of these cannot be proven

statistically. On the other hand, this study adds some extra value to former studies

by showing the importance of each motivator both for normal and lead users.

There is also one group of motivators that does not exist in any of the referred

studies – “ideas coming real”. It can also be seen as a motivation which

differentiates an idea marketplace from any other online community. These results

also answer explicitly to the issue about monetary rewards as a motivator.

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Monetary rewards were among the most popular motivators of both normal and

lead users; hence, money can motivate users to perform creative tasks as well.

The roles identified in the literature review differed significantly from the roles in

the results of the use case study. The field study in Dell’s IdeaStorm revealed that

mostly information related roles occurred in a real idea marketplace and that the

same roles recurred with all user types. Therefore, the relevancy of the most roles

identified in the literature review can be questioned. However, according to

IdeaStorm, there are two user groups, lead users who come to the site to spend

some time and normal users who come to the site usually only once to perform

some task planned beforehand. The interviews supported the division to normal

users and lead users and provided a few additional roles that can be described as

supporting roles, as these belong to Company’s employees and they support the

usage of an idea marketplace. All the roles identified in the use case study could,

however, adopt the roles from the literature review as certain behaviors, especially

when it comes to atmosphere creation, such as welcoming and encouraging users.

The literature review provided a miscellaneous collection of functions for an idea

marketplace. Interviews were the main method to empirically collect suitable

functions for an idea marketplace. Basically, the interviews did cover all the same

functions as the literature, but moreover, they also provided some more concrete

features. For instance, compared to “scores system”, the interviews described what

kind of score systems would work best. Some of the most promising but yet not

planned features include “hot or not” to get evenly views for all ideas, constantly

changing content by community facilitator, innovation methods and tools, sliders to

measure radicality and relevancy, orderable idea notification for all the Company’s

employees and sketches from the Company's designers.

The results of the study are also well in line with requirements that chapter 2 set to

a future innovation system. Chapter two emphasized the meaning of users as

innovators and networks of different actors. An idea marketplace can provide a

place for these parties to meet. In an ideal system, actors are not jealous for their

ideas and all actors are equal and empowered. R&D and business are developed

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together utilizing each other’s results and resources. An idea marketplace can

enable all of these requirements.

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10. Strengths and weaknesses of the study

The strengths of this study included the newness of the topic – not much study has

been done on idea crowdsourcing, at least not on motivation, feature and role

perspectives. This can also be seen as a weakness when it comes to the literature

review. The literature review had to be made using studies about just some general

online communities. However, that led to an unexpected result, as motivations to

work, including money, applied also to motivation to create ideas.

The overall quality of the literature was academic and objective, excluding some

publications by idea marketplace suppliers (e.g. Cisco, IBM, Accept Software), and

subject-matter organizations (e.g. CHI 2008 Proceedings, Proceedings of World

Conference on Educational Multimedia), whose own material may be biased.

The weakest feature of this study was the relatively small number of respondents

of the survey. The small number of respondents, which spread into 30 different

motivators, provided so little data that results cannot necessarily be generalized.

An unquestionable strength of the empirical part was triangulation, conducting the

study from three angels, interviews, observation and survey, which supported each

other. Triangulation can capture a more complete, holistic, and contextual picture

of the matters being studied as different methods compensate the weaknesses of

each other. Thus, researchers using triangulation can be more confident of their

results. Triangulation may also help to uncover new dimension of a phenomenon.

The only clear weakness of triangulation is that replication of it is extremely

difficult, especially qualitative methods. (Jick, 1979)

Another general strength was that the researcher had a privilege to daily

participate in the project work where an idea marketplace was actually designed

and planned, and therefore, the amount of tacit knowledge about the topic became

remarkable. Naturally, this kind of knowledge could not directly be used in the

study, but dozens of workshops and meetings must have helped to outline the

questions to be presented in the actual interviews and the survey.

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11. Recommendations for further research

When dissecting the synthesis of the study, one may notice some similarity

between motivation themes and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory (Maslow,

1943). “Self-actualization” can be found from both the results of this study and

Maslow’s hierarchy, “recognition” has elements similar to “esteem”, “love and

belonging” is like “social reasons”, and “safety” as well as “physiological needs” are

related to “financial motivators” and “ideas coming real”. It would be interesting to

study if a corresponding hierarchy would apply to these motivators as well, that is,

lower levels needs must be met to be motivated for higher motivators. This would

also mean that the poor would get motivated for money, while wealthy users would

only care for higher motivators. It remained unclear if money is only a hygiene

factor or an actual motivator for users. Finding this out would be important in

order to know whether additional rewards are needed besides money, or is it

enough. On the other way around, organizers of idea crowdsourcing challenges

should know if the monetary reward is always needed as a hygiene factor.

Another theme to study, which is also crucial for the success of an idea

marketplace, would definitely be what would motivate one to innovate. This should

have been the fundamental answer of this study as well, but, after all, an idea

marketplace turned out to be a place for several supporting activities that were

needed to get innovations and thus, the focus moved radically. To continue from

this theme, tools to innovate in online community should also be studied further as

well as the process of getting new ideas and submitting them to the system. For

instance, a question “does one get an idea prior to hearing about an idea

marketplace and then go and submit it, or does one go to the site at first and then

start creating ideas” remained open. If the answer is the latter, features enabling

"risk-taking, uninhibited exploration, and combination of old elements into new

patterns" should be provided. This is anyway needed to make “bad ideas” into good

ones, which is the former case. Studying what would these features be would also

be interesting.

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12. Managerial implications

Managerial implications of this study are discussed as follows using motivational

themes as a structure, but related roles and features are dealt with simultaneously.

In the end, roles identified in the literature study are discussed briefly.

As already noted in the introduction of Part IV, it is best to include all motivational

themes to all challenges, because normal users and lead users are motivated by

partially different motivations and because after all most motivations are built in to

the system. “Ideas coming real” is the most essential motivation to have – at least

the winning idea must be implemented and the implementation, when done,

reported in the Idea Marketplace. The more ideas get implemented, the better.

“Ideas coming real” links to another important motivation, which is recognition,

and especially company recognition. Users must be shown that they are listened

and their ideas counts. Out of proposed solutions, the best way to do it is to have a

community facilitator taking care of general communication, and recruiting

internally a group of experts from related areas to go through ideas of each

challenge. Having a separate designer sketching some interesting ideas was also

nice idea, which would bring credibility to the site.

Also “social reasons” is in-build to the site and its features – in every challenge,

users can cooperate, network and communicate. The role of external social media

channels has an extremely important role in here. New emerging social media

trends, such as location, should be scouted and possible cooperation with trending

social media channels studied. Self-actualization is likewise there for each

challenge, but that’s very personal. For instance, learning experience is hard to

assure. Instead, fun and even addictive experience can be offered using different

gaming elements, like scores, badges and timers.

However, there is one important motivation that can and should be planned

individually for each challenge, that is, financial motivations. That’s due to variation

of people’s preferences; users simply have different interests and needs. Therefore,

the Company is recommended to study the preferences of the target group before

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each challenge. For instance, if the target group is people interested in

sustainability, a new car is obviously not the best reward. The study can be done

simply by interviewing a few representatives of the target group, or the partner

organization who probably knows its own people best.

Although this study concluded that there are only two main roles, normal users and

lead users, and some supporting roles in an idea marketplace, roles identified from

the literature review shouldn’t be forgotten. Some of them were crucial for the

success of the studied online community. For instance, core organizers and

advanced users should be raised in the community. From atmosphere point of

view, guide, provider, historian, catalyst, greeter, clown, encourager and

atmosphere constructors could definitely have a positive impact on the

atmosphere, and actually all these roles could be embodied in the community

facilitator. Community facilitator should also take care of administrative roles

including ambassador and orienter. Being a performer or hero is something that

anyone should be able to become – for instance as an “ideator of the week”.

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Appendix 1: Survey form

Motivation survey about ideation This survey has been made for the Company - the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer - as a part of master’s thesis of Aalto University. All answers are highly valued and processed confidentially. the Company is planning to establish a web-based service to gather new ideas from all kinds of people from all around the world. In the service, best ideas will evolve to real products and users are able to follow the development of their ideas, as well as have an effect on the development process. Users are also rewarded for their contributions. The goal of this survey is to find out what could motivate people to use this kind of service and what kind of rewards would be most valued. Answering to this survey is really important, because it helps us to develop a popular and world-wide service. And as a result, the Company is able to serve its customers and satisfy their needs even better. And as a compensation for your effort, we raffle off three Angry Bird toys!

* Required

Background Information

How old are you? * Under 14 years old

What is your gender? *

Where do you live? *

In what kind of surroundings do you live? * What is the highest educational level you have? *

Elementary school

High school

Undergraduate

Graduate

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None

Other:

Please estimate what are your monthly incomes in dollars or in your own currency?

* Please write down also the used currency! How well do you use computers? *

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Not at all Very well

Do you work at the Company? * Do you use any social media tools on your free time? * E.g. Facebook, MySpace,

YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, hi5, Bebo, etc.

Do you use any social media tools in your work? If you use social media in your work, what tools do you use and how?

Motivational Questions Let’s assume that the Company has established a website, where people can submit ideas related to mobile phones and also browse other people's ideas, vote them and see them coming real. If you had an idea, would you go and enter it to the website?

*

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If yes, what would motivate you to do that?

What would make you go and see such a website in the first place? *

A suggestion by a friend

A link in Facebook, blog or other social media

An advertisement in Google

An advertisement on TV

Other:

Let’s then assume that you went to the website in question and entered your idea. Which of the following additional activities you would be interested in? *

Reading other ideas

Voting other ideas

Commenting other ideas

Making business plans, demos or prototypes about other ideas

Browsing other users

Organizing your own idea challenges

Other:

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If you wouldn't do any of these activities, why wouldn't you be interested? Which of the following would motivate you to participate at the first time? * Please choose max 5 items.

Getting little amount of money from each activity

Chance of getting a lot of money if my idea wins

Chance of getting a new mobile phone or other technical device

Care for community

Getting new friends

Feeling of togetherness

Chance of getting a paid trip to the space museum in Moscow

Cooperation with others

Knowledge exchange

Personal learning

Intellectual stimulations

New viewpoints and synergy

Employer recognition

Peer recognition


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Winning and competing

Altruism, charity

Enjoyment and fun

Ideology

Reciprocity

Interesting challenges

Sense of obligation to contribute

Chance of winning a one day off with pay

Chance of winning something you wouldn't otherwise get

Making better products/services

Seeing own ideas come true

Improving your own living conditions through new products

Improving others living conditions through new products

Passing time

Nothing

Other:

Which of the following would motivate you to participate regularly? * Please choose max 5 items.

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Getting little amount of money from each activity

Chance of getting a lot of money if my idea wins


Care for community

Getting new friends




Knowledge exchange

Personal learning




Peer recognition



Altruism, charity

Enjoyment and fun

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Ideology

Reciprocity









Passing time

Nothing

Other:

What would motivate you to create demos about ideas? * This requires more time and effort than e.g. submitting ideas. Please choose max 5 items.

Getting little amount of money from each demo

Chance of getting a lot of money if my demo wins


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Care for community

Getting new friends




Knowledge exchange

Personal learning




Peer recognition



Altruism, charity

Enjoyment and fun

Ideology

Reciprocity


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Passing time

Having interfaces to something I can't get from anywhere else (e.g. location data)

Getting cool tools for creating demos

Getting so simple tools that even non-programmer can use them

Other:

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Appendix 2: Interviewees

Internal stakeholders

BetaLabs/Backstage:

John Markow, 23 June, 2010, ”Roles and motivation of users in online communities,

features of online communities”.

Tommi Vilkamo, 18 May, 2010, ”Roles and motivation of users in online

communities, features of online communities”.

Mobile Solutions:

Jukka Märijärvi, 20 July, 2010, “Product development at Nokia”.

Maija Nervola, 05 January, 2011, Product development at Nokia”.

Pia Erkinheimo, 21 December, 2010, ”Idea creation platforms at Nokia”.

Nokia Care:

Juha-Matti Heikkinen, 07 September, 2010, ”Roles and motivation of users in online


Hanna-Kaisa Sävelkoski, 13 September, 2010, “Motivations to use online

communities”.

Nokia Digital Marketing:

Saara Bergström, 07 September, 2010, “Features of appealing social media

services”.

Jussi-Pekka Erkkola, 14 December, 2010, ”Roles and motivation of users in online


Arto Joensuu, 08 September, 2010, ”Roles and motivation of users in online


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Forum the Company:

Sami Pippuri, 16 December, 2010, ”Motivations of developers, features of online

communities from developer’s point of view”.

Consumer analytics and Insights:

Ville Tikka, 04 August, 2010, “How to make an online community innovative”.

External stakeholders:

Ville Peltola, IBM, 30 June, 2010, ”Roles and motivation of users in online


Teemu Arina, Dicole, 14 January, 2011, ”Features of an appealing online

community, collaborations features of an online community”.

Helene Auramo, Zipipop, 2 February, 2011,“Validating findings of the study”

Sami Oinonen, independent consultant, former employee of the Company, 8

September, 2010, ”Roles in an online community”.

Janne Saarikko, consultant, external employee at the Company, 14 December, 2010,

”Roles and motivation of users in online communities, features of online

communities”.

Lost interviews:

Ilkka Peltola (Betalabs / Backstage), 19 May, 2010, ”Roles and motivation of users

in online communities, features of online communities”.

Harri Lakkala, (Independent consultant, former employee of the Company), 23

September, 2010, ”Roles and motivation of users in online communities, features of

online communities”.

Tuija Aalto, (Yle), 17 September, 2010, ”Roles and motivation of users in online


developing a new global idea creation platform – case idea marketplace

Technology

idea marketplaceas

idea creationcontext

idea crowdsourcing challenges

new idea marketplace

idea creation process

roles of users

user roles

case study