The role of Intellectual Property Rights in the value capturing of crowdsourcing for innovation contests

In this study, we investigate the role of IPR arrangements in crowdsourcing for innovation challenges. Integrating Property Rights Theory and the open innovation literature, we propose that specific challenge attributes affect the seekers organizations’ choice between alternative IPR arrangements and how this choice, in turn, affects the self-selection of external solvers into solving the challenge. We collected multi-source, interview data with open innovation directors and we built a unique data set of 729 awarded challenges broadcasted on InnoCentive platform from 2010 to 2016. Our findings contribute to the emerging literature on open innovation and crowdsourcing literature by bringing a Property Right Theory perspective to different IPR arrangements in the crowdsourcing contests.