Social interdependence on crowdsourcing platforms

As part of their embrace of open innovation, many organizations have established innovation contests to gather creative ideas from online users. Some of these contests are deployed on platforms that use hybrid coopetitive models to promote a combination of competition and cooperation. In this paper, we use a theoretical framework, namely social interdependence theory, to understand and explain the behaviors of users of idea crowdsourcing platforms to support organizational innovation. In our empirical study using both behavioral and social network data of 19,516 registered users of a crowdsourcing platform, we first analyze different user profiles that display varying levels of competitive and cooperative behaviors. Second, through a qualitative analysis, we explore the users' perceptions of the structured coopetition model. Our results reveal that the mixture of cooperative and competitive design features positively impacts the creative process and nudges the nature of competition along constructive lines.