Caring About Other Firms' Research and Development: Intrinsic Motivation in Cross-Industry Innovation

Abstract

Integration of externals in open innovation (inbound) shows highest application in firms. Recently, domain-spanning collaboration has been identified to be specifically relevant for overcoming local search and supporting exploration. With our empirical study on what motivates external experts to engage in cross-industry innovation activities we contribute to the less-researched field on motivation in the light of open innovation with special focus on employed individuals. In this research from interview-assisted questionnaires with 159 managers we apply a framework based on motivation and innovation literature. We show that external experts are mostly motivated intrinsically as private actors contrary to other employed actors in inbound open innovation such as open source software developers. Especially task motivation shows highest appearance for external experts although the task is solely set by the inviting firm. This supports recent findings on the importance of distant analogies.

Keywords: Open innovation, Motivation, External experts, Cross-industry, Employed software developers, Distant analogies