Self-organized or meta-organized contests? The two faces of innovation contests in digital product innovation

Unlike traditional centralized innovation within a firm, digital innovation is more distributed and involves many heterogeneous innovators within a society. A key challenge is the personalized governance of different innovators. We explored how innovation contests affected digital product innovation across multiple innovators, using a self- or meta-organized contest. Using a dataset of 17,985 innovators, 14,734 innovation contests, and 212,767 digital products from 2015 to 2022, we found that a self-organized contest increases the originality and popularity of digital products, whereas a meta-organized contest decreases these outcomes. An innovation contest is a valuable governance tool for digital innovation, but it backfires when there is a mismatch with a particular innovator. Specifically, the self-organized contest is more helpful for experts' and openers' digital product innovation, but not for novices' or conservatives’ innovation. The opposite is true for meta-organized contests. This study contributes to contest management and personalized governance in digital innovation.