Open Innovation With Maker Communities: Exploring Collaboration Motives and Preferences of Makers

ABSTRACT Companies constantly seek new ways to innovate and integrate external knowledge into their innovation processes. In the era of makerspaces, a new source for collaborative innovation has evolved. As research shows, the users of makerspaces, so‐called makers, tend to be highly creative and innovative. That makes this tech‐savvy community very promising for companies to collaborate with during innovation processes. Prior research revealed that makers and companies are open to collaboration. However, we still know little about how makers can be engaged in corporate innovation processes and in which phases they are interested in collaborating. Our quantitative study of N = 428 makers addresses this research gap and explicitly examines the collaboration motives of makers concerning new product development processes with companies. We find four distinct maker types that differ in their collaboration motives: Co‐Creation Appreciators, Knowledge Hunters, Opportunity Maximizers, and Reward Seekers.