Towards a Better Understanding of Solving Complex Problems Through Innovation Contests
Open AccessProblem-solving, which is core to an organization’s success, is undergoing a significant shift. More and more, public and private organizations are shifting away from solely internal, expert-driven processes. Instead, they use crowdsourcing mechanisms, like innovation contests, to look for innovative outsiders. However, our understanding of how these work and how to use them largely rests on studies of consumer products or conceptual designs. The dynamics and outcomes of these simpler contests differ from those of complex systems. As such, we do not know how crowdsourcing’s existing theoretical constructs, or the relationships between them, apply to engineering problems.My dissertation addresses this gap by exploring crowdsourcing in engineered systems and extending current theory. Here, I draw on two multiyear fieldworks in NASA’s crowdsourcing ecosystem: the Asteroid Grand Challenge and the CentennialChallenges Program. Using these rich data, I make four contributions across four essays, all expanding on existing theory on crowdsourcing. First, I create a benefits framework for complex innovation contests: organizations hosting a contest—the solution-seeker—benefit from access to technology and an expanded network, both from participants and industry advisors. Second, I show that a problem-solver’s technological trajectory is related to their success in an innovation contest: teams interested in pursuing opportunities in the organization’s industry were more likely to win. Furthermore, this kind of solver—the opportunist—responded strongly to the seeker’s in-kind prize incentives, which presents a new avenue for arbitrage. Third, I describe how problem formulation is a shared task between the solver and the seeker: the former can reformulate the latter’s problem to introduce their expertise, resulting in useful solutions. Lastly, I describe how the seeker formulates a complex problem for outsider input: I show how their actions to shape the solvers’ solution space are guided by their knowledge of potential solutions and the problem-solvers’ capabilities. Together, this work demonstrates a rich exchange between seeker and solvers, contrasting with the view of contests as a brief interaction. Here, seekers and solvers pay broad and sustained attention to the problem, exchange problem and solution knowledge, and drive technology and form partnerships over the long term.These theoretical insights, and the practical levers they spell out, are both timely and needed. Without them, future endeavors are at risk of wasting the crowd’s potential to help solve complex problems.
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