he runs research groups on virtual communities, e-health, and ubiquitous/mobile computing and manages several publicly funded research projects. his teaching and research areas include It innovation management, service science, ubiquitous and mobile computing, collaboration engineering, e-health, online communities, and It management. MichaeL huber is a researcher at the chair for Information Systems, technische universität München since he graduated from there with an M.S. in computer Science in 2007. his research interests include community engineering, virtual communities, communities for innovations, It support of collaborative activities, and humancomputer interaction. he is engaged in the research project GENIE, a project that supports customer-driven development of innovations for software companies, funded by the German Federal Ministry of research and Education. he also runs the research project SaPiens-an Internet-based ideas competition for students and scholars, collaboratively developing innovations. uLrich bretschneider is a researcher at the chair for Information Systems, technische universität München, Munich, Germany. he graduated in business administration (majoring in Information Systems) at the university of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany. his current research experiences and interests include virtual communities as well as open innovation, especially ideas competitions and ideas communities. he runs the research project GENIE, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and research. he is also engaged in the research project SaPiens.

‘Crowdsourcing’ is currently one of the most discussed key words within the open innovation community. The major question for both research and business is how to find and lever the enormous potential of the ‘collective brain’ to broaden the scope of ‘open R&D’. Based on a literature review in the fields of Community Building and Innovation Management, this work develops an integrated framework called ‘Community Engineering for Innovations’. This framework is evaluated in an Action Research project – the case of an ideas competition for an ERP Software company. The case ‘SAPiens’ includes the design, implementation and evaluation of an IT‐supported ideas competition within the SAP University Competence Center (UCC) User Group. This group consists of approximately 60,000 people (lecturers and students) using SAP Software for educational purposes. The current challenges are twofold: on the one hand, there is not much activity yet in this community. On the other, SAP has not attempted to systematically address this highly educated group for idea generation or innovation development so far. Therefore, the objective of this research is to develop a framework for a community‐based innovation development that generates innovations, process and product ideas in general and for SAP Research, in particular, combining the concepts of idea competitions and virtual communities. Furthermore, the concept aims at providing an interface to SAP Human Resources processes in order to identify the most promising students in this virtual community. This paper is the first to present an integrated concept for IT‐supported idea competitions in virtual communities for leveraging the potential of crowds that is evaluated in a real‐world setting.

This study extends work gleaned from technology acceptance studies in healthcare by investigating factors which influence perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of e-health services. Based on these empirical findings, we derive implications for the design and introduction of e-health services including suggestions for introducing the topic to physicians in ambulatory care and incentive structures for using e-health.

Incentive-based forms of crowdfunding-such as reward-, equity-and lending-based crowdfunding-are becoming increasingly popular. However, research that studies backers' motivations for funding in these environments is still in an embryonic state, revealing an inconsistent and narrow picture. The few existing studies are largely guided by the idea that backers are mainly egoistically motivated and do not have prosocial motives. We developed a research model that describes backers' motivation and conducted an empirical study to examine this model. Results indicate that backers indeed have several self-interest motivations for funding: prospect of a reward; expectation of recognition from others; to lobby a certain project in the hopes of its fruition; and to develop their image. However, some backers are also prosocially motivated in that they develop feelings of liking for a certain venture and/or project team. Furthermore, we found evidence that herding has a significant moderating effect on backers' reward motivation. Strategic IS researchers as well as crowdfunding practitioners can draw on our findings to systematically design, implement, and evaluate potential incentive systems that respond to reward-, recognition-, lobbying-, image-and liking-motives and thereby attract the crowd more effectively to invest in ventures presented on incentive-based crowdfunding systems.