Participation in On-Line Co-Creation: Assessment and Review of Motivations

The present article provides an overview of the research on motivation for online co-creation. Motivating participants to contribute in online co-creation endeavours is one of the key challenges in online co-creation. Due to this, an array of scholars has faced this question using a variety of research designs. We found that the multitude of motivational factors that the literature provides can be grouped into five distinct classes based on the overview model of motivation by Heckhausen and Heckhausen. We identify several subclasses for each class and provide a detailed overview for each of them. We also find that ‘expectancies’, a fundamental building block in work motivation has hardly been touched upon by research on motivation for online co-creation.