Our experimental study provides evidence by analyzing the effects of two different innovation contests on subjects' innovativeness: a prize for the cumulative innovativeness and a prize for the best innovation.
Maxwell & Westerfield (2002) argue that an entrepreneur's innovativeness, which is an aspect of his/ her competencies, depends largely on the level of his/her formal education as well as prior managerial experience.
In addition to measuring the impact that formalization has on the different stages of the innovation process, this study would benefit by having a more objective measure of innovativeness, a measure more free from employee self-efficacy.
Personal innovativeness represents the degree to which a person is willing to risk testing an innovation [ 47, 48].
Regarding the participation of stakeholders, it is known that 'early adopters' are important: [ 21] Rogers described that they show a high degree of innovativeness, are a role model for others and help trigger the critical mass when adopting an innovation [ 21].
For example, Eastman et al. (2014) posited that a person with a higher level of innovativeness will have a stronger tendency to share information or their own experience related to the products or services.
Spriggs et al. (2012) found an overall link between a family firms' innovativeness and performance in small firms, and other research have suggested that family firms that do devote resources to innovation tend to have greater tendencies toward increased firm performance and growth (Eddleston et al. 2008; Gudmunson et al. 2003; McCann et al. 2001).
Previous research has shown the effects of an individual's innate innovativeness on adoption of innovations (Foxall 1995; Im et al. 2003; Lim and Park 2013).
This concept helps capture consumers with a higher degree of innovativeness on a specific domain of products, which, in turn, predicts actual behavior or intention.
In our literature review we mentioned that a stream of research points to the ability to network with other social actors as a good predictor of a firm's innovativeness, which we labelled as the sixth stream of literature relevant for the technology of foolishness.
