Effectiviness of open innovation competitions

Abstract

Innovations are important as business life is becoming more and more competitive. Innovative products and solutions are important for companies, and they are investing large amount of money to develop breakthrough innovations. Due to these results, companies have started to search ideas outside of their organizations and new business fields. One possible method search ideas is to organize open innovation competitions where problem is presented to large groups of presenters.

This study is a case study, by which we are exploring the success factors for student-company competitions and phenomena that makes competitions innovative-creative. Target of this study is to find out most suitable way of organizing competitions to gain maximal results from these competitions. In addition, we were interested to know what kind of effects of these competitions can produce.

The results of our study showed that innovation competitions can help achieve significant results, e.g. bigger or smaller product innovations, and changes to big international organizations. An important result for the company is also the fact that competitions are used to find talented people who continue to develop innovative products.