Please use this form to submit your study for inclusion into our database. It will be checked by a member of the Innovation Growth Lab team, who may be in contact to ask for more information. Your email address * Your name * Title * The name of the study Short summary A brief description of the project's goals and its current state Abstract <p>Existing theories and empirical research on how innovation occurs largely assume that innovativeness is an inherent characteristic of the individual and that people with this innate ability select into jobs that require it. In this paper, we investigate whether people who do not self-select into being innovators can be induced to innovate, and whether they innovate differently than those who do self-select into innovating. To test these questions, we designed and implemented an innovation contest for engineering and computer science students which allowed us to differentiate between those who self-select into innovative activities and those who are willing to undertake them only after receiving an additional incentive for doing so. We also randomly offer encouragement to subsets of both the induced and self-selected contest participants in order to examine the importance of confidence-building interventions on each sample. We find that while induced participants have different observable characteristics than those that were ‘innately’ drawn to the competition, on average, the success of induced participants was statistically indistinguishable from their self-selected counterparts and encouragement does not change this result. Heterogeneity in treatment effects suggests an important role for the use of targeted interventions.</p> The full abstract of the study, if available Links http://www.nber.org/papers/w24339.pdf Links to any published papers and related discussions Authors * Affiliations Academic and other institutes that the authors of the study are members of Delivery partner Organisations involved in delivering the trial, if appropriate Year Year Year199419951996199719981999200020012002200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026 Month MonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec Day Day12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031 Journal Journal publishing the study, if available Publication stage * Working Paper Published Ongoing Research Forthcoming Discussion Paper Research theme * Entrepreneurship Innovation Business Growth Country Country or countries where this study took place. Topics What sort of topics does the study cover? Sample attributes Hypotheses / research question Whether and how induced innovators perform differently than self-selected innovators? Do the encouragement emails affected these groups differently? Sample Trial population and sample selection Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Department students at UC-San Diego Number of treatment groups Size of treatment groups Size of control group Unit of analysis Clustered? Yes No Cluster details Trial attributes Treatment description Two interventions, one a monetary incentive to induce innovation and another non monetary motivational support, were used to explore self-selection in innovation. Rounds of data collection Baseline data collection and method Written survey when individuals sign-up for the contest Data collection method and data collected Evaluation Outcome variables <p>Signing up for the contest, submission of app, and quality of app. Quality of submitted app was assessed by a panel of expert judges who are also the people that select the problem the app is supposed to solve. Quality was judged based on novelty, functionality, user friendliness, and commercial value.</p> Results <p>Participants that were induced into the competition had different observable characteristics, but their success was statistically indistinguishable from their self-selected counterparts. Encouragement does not change this result.</p> Intervention costs Cost benefit ratio Reference Graff Zivin, J., Lyons, E. (2018). 'Can innovators be created? Field experimental evidence from an innovation contest'. Working paper. Citation for use in academic references
