Online Innovation Outsourcing Environment, R & D Personnel Competency Research

Information Technology (IT), especially internet network, has accelerated innovation proliferation, and melted organization boundary of traditional innovation activities. The innovation mode has experienced an alteration from producer-centric to user-centric and from production-oriented to service oriented, a process based on demand with internet as the intermediary. Online outsourcing, as a newly developed mode, has become the focus of entrepreneurs and scholars; the profits and talents of online outsourcing are expanding rapidly. Under the condition of online outsourcing, the main innovation body, the talents, obtain their remuneration through task competition. However, because of the complexity and uniqueness, the innovation competition is becoming increasingly fierce; meanwhile, the talents do not know what abilities they should maser before they can complete the task and win the rewards and what abilities will affect their performance, which results in excess competition and their failure to improve their abilities and to be aware to the causes of the variance of their performance. Competence research provides an effective way to solve the problem. Therefore, it is extremely important to research the characteristics, motivation mechanism, and modeling and delve into the relationship between competence and performance under the condition of online outsourcing.This paper uses theories about competence, focuses on the special environment of online outsourcing, and researches systematically the competence of the talents. The whole paper is based on empirical studies, psychology, management, organizational behavior, engineer and competence theories, using statistical methods, conducts research of the competence of online talents, in order to find and analyze the competence model and its relationship with performance and finally to solve the problem of the talents.The word and innovation of this paper are as follows:Firstly, traditional competence model is built within different contexts; there are no efforts to develop competence model under the condition of online innovation outsourcing. This paper summarizes and reviews the theories relative to online innovation outsourcing and competence, and analyzes the causes of online outsourcing, the role and job characteristics of the talents as well as the effects and motivation mechanism of the competence of the talents. And then, we propose two hypotheses:the competence of the online talents constitutes a multi-layered and multi-dimensional structure; there is a strong relationship between competence and the performance of the online developers.Secondly, how to extract the competence characteristics of the talents completely and accurately and how to construct competence model of the talents scientifically and systematically are the main points of this paper. This paper tries to build competence model from two perspectives. One is based on event-interview, exploratory factor analysis and other empirical methods to obtain the initial competence model of the talents. The other perspective is based on theoretical analysis to construct theoretical frame of the competence model of online talents. Thus, by combining theoretical and empirical research methods and based on systematical research logic, we construct the competence model of talents under the condition of online innovation outsourcing.Thirdly, whether the competence model is reliable, effective and accurate is the key point of this research. Based on data collected from questionnaire and through confirmatory factor analysis, this paper tests the multi-factors'model and second-order model. The result indicates an adequate match between the data and the model, which demonstrates the validity of the competence model of the online researchers. This provides a clear insight into the demands of the abilities of the online researchers, and provides basis and references for solving the problems underlying online innovation outsourcing and conducting researches on competence of online researchers. This result also substantiates the multi-layered and multi-dimensional structure of the competence of online researchers.Fourth, previous studies on performance of online innovation outsourcing personnel focuses on the perspectives of game theory, mechanism design, behavior pattern and impact factors. In this paper, we introduce competence model to the study of researcher, propose a performance model of online innovation outsourcing personnel, and validate the model using structural equation model. Based on that, we build a model linking competence and performance, and validate the significant effect of competence on performance. As a result, we understand how competence can impact performance, and find reasons accounting for the discrepancy among researcher. This research provide not only a new pattern for studying the performance of online innovation outsourcing personnel, but also a practical idea for promoting the researcher's performance in practice.At last, to address the problem of information inaccurate and incomplete, the difficulty of applying precise numerical approach for evaluation, and fallacy of subjective manipulation, we propose a comprehensive multi-layer methodology to evaluate the competence of researcher which makes our approach more applicable.The main conclusions in this paper are listed as follows:According to the theoretical and empirical analysis, we get a competence model for researcher in an online innovation outsourcing context which consists of 6 dimensions and 18 features. By analyzing the model that linking competence and performance, we validate the significant impact of researcher's competence on performance. A causation analysis of researcher's competence and performance show that different dimensions of competence have different levels of impact on each performance dimension. All these findings are significant in helping researcher to promote their competence, seek out the cause of different performance, and find a way into the blue ocean. These findings are also helpful for enterprises, because it helps managers to choose the right person and increase the success possibility of outsourcing. We believe this will eventually lead to higher online innovation outsourcing participation, both for individuals and enterprises, and a better tomorrow for online innovation outsourcing in practice.