Innovative Behaviour Types and Their Influence on Individual Crowdsourcing Performances

Crowdsourcing as a tool for idea generation has become popular for companies in the last few years. The aim of this research is to identify innovative behaviour types in an intra-organisational online ideation contest. Based on a survey with 75 employees of a specialty chemicals company, we determined the degrees of personality severity of two main factors — creativity and proactivity. Creativity seems to enhance the number of submitted ideas while proactive people's ideas seem to have greater chances of being pursued by the company. Four different personality combinations arise out of the empirical analysis that show specific performance types and are clustered into different activity roles, such as the follower, the proactive promotor, the creative innovator and the intrapreneur. Some of them refer to existing innovation roles. This novel combination of crowdsourcing performance and innovative behaviour delivers new insights that enrich current understanding on the characteristics of internal crowds.