As organizations recognize the importance of open innovation, understanding emerging mechanisms for soliciting outside participation is a growing area of academic interest. Strategies can be as diverse as hosting innovation contests, sponsoring open source software (OSS) communities, or engaging in bilateral partnerships. While these have been studied as distinct strategies, more recent work has identified the possibility for combining these approaches, or deploying different methods at different times. Because each of these open innovation strategies are characterized by different incentive systems as well as different work and social practices, the combination of these can reveal unexpected participant responses (e.g., collaboration in innovation contests, competitive behavior in OSS communities). This study examines an explicit attempt to combine these strategies, to host an open source innovation contest. Through the case of Google's Android Developer Challenge, a series of multi-million dollar innovation contests used to launch an OSS community over several years, this study utilized a process approach to understanding open source innovation contests to understand how participants responded and also how the contest conditions changed over time. We found several practices of competition and collaboration that worked around the short term and long term incentives and constraints posed by the contest. We also followed the contest through various transition phases and found that participants reacted strongly to changes in structure, execution, and shifting conditions over time. Through this case, we extend our understanding of innovation contests as a process and specifically the promises and pitfalls of open source innovation contests.

随着组织认识到开放式创新的重要性，了解新兴的吸引外部参与的机制已成为学术界日益增长的领域。策略可以多种多样，例如举办创新竞赛，赞助开源软件（OSS）社区或参与双边合作伙伴关系。尽管将这些作为不同的策略进行了研究，但最近的工作已经确定了组合这些方法或在不同时间部署不同方法的可能性。因为这些开放式创新策略中的每一个都具有不同的激励机制以及不同的工作和社会实践特征，所以这些组合可以揭示出意外的参与者响应（例如，创新竞赛中的协作，OSS社区中的竞争行为）。这项研究考察了将这些策略结合起来举办一次开源创新竞赛的明确尝试。通过Google的Android开发人员挑战赛，历时数年的一系列数百万美元的创新竞赛启动了OSS社区，这项研究利用一种过程方法来理解开源创新竞赛，以了解参与者的反应以及竞赛的方式。条件随着时间而改变。我们发现了一些竞争和合作的实践，这些实践围绕着竞赛带来的短期和长期激励与约束。我们还通过不同的过渡阶段跟踪比赛，发现参与者对结构，执行力和条件随时间变化的变化做出了强烈反应。通过这种情况，