Designing incentives in innovations processes. Gamification as an approach for creating an incentive system for the early stage of the innovation process (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,7, Berlin School of Economics and Law, language: English, abstract: Incentive systems can contribute to the best possible exploitation of the employee's abilities. A new way of setting those incentives and motivating employees is gamification. Gamification is defined as the application of game mechanics to a non-game setting, such as the business environment. Companies have discovered game-like incentives for motivating their employees, and now, this paper tries to create a gamified incentive system for motivating employees in the early stage of the innovation process.

Innovation creates value, strengthens the market position and creates competitive advantages. Therefore innovation is widely seen as a critical source for economic success for companies. However, at the same time, innovation is expensive. For example, in 2018 alone, Apple invested as much as 14,24 billion dollars on research and development. This represented around 46% of their total operating expenses and approximately 2,6% of their total revenues. These costs are making it vital for companies to ensure the efficient use of innovation resources.

This efficiency is largely determined by the competence, creativity and motivation of the employees working in the area of in research and development (R&D). Thus, companies have to generate adequate motivation in employees to deliver their innovative ideas, obtain a patent and develop the patentable idea into profitable innovation. Human resource (HR) management practices are considered as an essential instrument to fulfil this task.

However, standard pay-for-performance schemes, which only reward short-term financial success, are not suitable for fulfilling this task in the innovation process, because innovation processes are likely to fail as they contain a high degree of uncertainty. In standard schemes, this failure would result in penalties by a lower compensation or a possible termination of the contract. This punishment has the potential to harm the innovative behaviour of employees. A company that wants to encourage innovation must design incentive systems that free employees to take risks, experiments and discover what practices and technologies are the most effective.

These unique characteristics of innovation processes are the reason why analysing incentive systems in the context of innovation processes is of particular interest. Especially since incentive systems are considered as essential for ensuring the efficiency of innovation processes, as employees adapt their behaviour to these systems.