Integration of Innovation-contest-outcomes: New Ideas and Intrapreneurial Mindsets among Employees.

This paper deals with Innovation Contests (ICs), hosted by large firms, specifically offline ICs using internal non-experts (employees) as the main innovation source. Firms among other purposes use IC-ideas to promote themselves and to push their innovative capacity; we therefore argue in line with a call in the IC-literature that the way in which firms proceed with the outcomes of ICs, when these have been integrated, should be studied. We take this issue a step further, arguing that there is a need for broadening the understanding of the outcomes of the ICs in IC-literature. Based on an in-depth case study from a firm organising ICs since 2004, we show that ICs develop intrapreneurial mindsets among the participants. This type of outcome is considered just as important as new business ideas, as the changed mindsets work beyond the IC-period and is dispersed into the whole organisation afterwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]