LISH is working to develop testable systems and methods to help open innovation (OI) practitioners explore techniques for best practices. To date, the lab has spent extensive time studying both contests and communities with profit companies, governments, academic research centers, and platforms. Research in these areas explore and test fundamental academic theories about how prized-based contests and norms-based communities have been designed. Topics include prize distributions, incentives for participation, impact of pecuniary vs. non-pecuniary prizes, crowd behavior in contests, collaboration in competitions, and fundamentals of problem formulation and prize design. Practitioner papers tackle how managers can pilot contests, develop strategies to sustain and scale OI inside firms, combat cultural resistance, conduct cost counterfactuals for OI vs traditional methods of procurement, and engage with existing crowd platforms and OI ecosystems.
