At this year's European Conference on Information Systems(ECIS), which took place from June 15-17, 2020, PD Dr. Ulrich Bretschneider has been awarded the Best Research-in-Progress Paper Award . The ECIS is one of the two most renowned international conferences in the field of Information Systems(Wirtschaftsinformatik) and took place this year under the particularly topical leitmotif "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in a Digitizing World" in view of various globally relevant issues. 

Ulrich Bretschneider received this prestigious award from the conference organizers for his paper "Which Motivations Boost Idea Quality? Exploring the Impact of Customers' Motives for Participating in Virtual Ideas Communities on Ideation Outcome". In this paper, he addresses the question of how high-quality ideas from virtual idea communities (VIC) can be made as useful as possible. Among other things, he examines the factors that influence customers' idea formation results and how effective incentive strategies must be designed.

Abstract
For practice it is important to leverage ideas of high quality from Virtual Ideas Communities (VIC). Therefore, firms that run such VIC have a strong interest in understanding which factors impact customers' ideation outcome. This research investigates the influence of customers' motivation factors for developing ideas on the quality of their ideas. So far, empirical studies that provide evidence on this association are neglected, although these insights would be highly beneficial for firms in their role as operator of VIC. Knowing the factors that have a positive influence will provide valuable insights into how to design effective incentive strategies that attract corresponding customer motivations and, in turn, will lead to higher levels of idea quality. In this research-in-progress paper we build a theoretical model explaining which of customers' motives for developing ideas have a positive impact on their ideation outcome.

The award-winning paper can be downloaded at the following link :
https://aisel.aisnet.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1047&context=ecis2020_rip