The Opportunists in Innovation Contests

Overview: Organizations increasingly turn to innovation contests for solutions to their complex problems. But these contests still face a fundamental inefficiency: they need to attract many participants to find the right solution, resulting in high costs and uncertainty. Studies have identified multiple dichotomies of successful and unsuccessful solver types, but these diverge. These studies also offer little guidance on how to attract successful solver types. We introduce the opportunist-transactor dichotomy, bridging whom to attract and how to attract them. Opportunists view the contest as a onramp to a new pursuit instead of a temporary undertaking. Characterizing solvers according to this new dichotomy was a better predictor of success than existing ones: in our context, most winners were opportunists. This type of solver was also reliably attracted by the seeker’s in-kind incentives, unlike those described by the other dichotomies. Our insights provide a deeper understanding of participants in complex contests and a concrete lever for influencing who shows up to solve.