Maker Communities as Sources of Open Innovation

Companies are constantly looking for new ways to innovate and integrate external knowledge into their innovation processes. In the era of makerspaces, a new source for collaborative innovation has evolved. As research shows, the users of makerspaces, so called makers, tend to be highly creative and innovative. That makes this tech-savvy community very promising for companies to collaborate with during innovation processes. Prior research revealed that makers and companies are open to collaborate. However, we still know little about how makers can be engaged in corporate innovation processes and in which phases (ideation, prototyping, test and launch) they are interested in for collaboration. Our quantitative study tackles this research gap and specifically looks into what might motivate makers to collaborate with companies in new product development processes. We find four distinct maker types that differ in their collaboration motives: reward enjoyers, knowledge hunters, opportunity seekers and intrinsic enthusiasts.