Show me your expertise before teaming up: Sharing online profiles predicts success in open innovation

The purpose of this paper is to examine how communication practices influence individuals’ team assembly and performance in open innovation contests.

This study analyzed behavioral trace data of 4,651 teams and 19,317 participants from a leading open innovation platform, Kaggle. The analyses applied weighted least squares regression and weighted mediation analysis.

Sharing online profiles positively relates to a person’s performance and likelihood of becoming a leader in open innovation teams. Team assembly effectiveness (one’s ability to team up with high-performing teammates) mediates the relationship between online profile sharing and performance. Moreover, sharing personal websites has a stronger positive effect on performance and likelihood of becoming a team leader, compared to sharing links to professional social networking sites (e.g. LinkedIn).

As team collaboration becomes increasingly common in open innovation, participants’ sharing of their online profiles becomes an important variable predicting their success. This study extends prior research on virtual team collaboration by highlighting the role of communication practices that occur in the team pre-assembly stage, as an antecedent of team assembly. It also addresses a long-standing debate about the credibility of information online by showing that a narrative-based online profile format (e.g. a personal website) can be more powerful than a standardized format (e.g. LinkedIn).

Open innovation organizers should encourage online profile sharing among participants to facilitate effective team assembly in order to improve innovation outcomes.

The current study highlights the importance of team assembly in open innovation, especially the role of sharing online profiles in this process. It connects two areas of research that are previously distant, one on team assembly and one on online profile sharing. It also adds new empirical evidence to the discussion about online information credibility.