What affects creative performance in idea co-creation: competitive, cooperative or coopetitive climate?

Companies develop co-creation platforms to collect innovative ideas generated by consumers. The idea competition model is traditionally used to organise such collective action and has been widely implemented by companies. In parallel, the development of collaborative platforms and social networks have led to the appearance of co-creation platforms based on a cooperation model with community features. In addition to these two classical models, a third model, a combination of competition and cooperation — the coopetition model — has emerged. Although there is growing interest in this model, no study to date has compared its performance to the other two models. Our research objective is to investigate and compare how these three models affect creative performance in terms of idea quantity and quality. We thus conducted an experiment with 177 students to generate ideas that were submitted to an established company. The results show that the coopetition model generates more ideas and more creative ideas than the other two models. We also offer insights on how a consumer co-creation platform should be designed to achieve better creative performance.