Encouraging Collaborative Idea-Building in Enterprise-Wide Innovation Challenges

Innovation challenges are increasingly adopted for idea generation in inter- and intra-firm innovation to elicit novel solutions from employees to strategic and business-related problems of the firm. However, the current idea-oriented approach is limited in leveraging the full capacity of open innovation, as it focuses more on identifying the best ideas through competition rather than generating new idea through participants’ recombination and integration of their expertise. We argue that the capabilities of innovation challenges can be fully leveraged when participants engage in collaborative interactions during innovation challenges. We propose the notion of “collaborative challenge,” denoting innovation challenges in which individual participants behave in ways that foster knowledge integration across diverse ideas