Empirical Research On Members’ Participation Intention And Innovation Evaluation In The Context Of Online Community

With the development of communication technology,it is hard for firms to face the fierce competition in the market by using the traditional paradigm of innovation.A new innovation paradigm – termed as use innovation – is becoming the major trend of enterprise innovation in the future.In this kind of innovation paradigm,users can make changes on the product provided by firms based on their own needs,however they should undertake the whole innovation process by using their own resource.Thus,comparing with the traditional innovation paradigm,users become the producers of the innovations,while firms should open their internal resources and develop strategies to support users’ innovative behavior.User innovation paradigm allows firms to not only leverage external sources of innovation,but also improve the market acceptance of their innovations.Attracting by these potential values,firms start to practice this new innovation paradigm and get benefits from it.In the academic area,most studies focus on analyzing how to practice this new innovation paradigm,while the problems arising from the practice has rarely examined by researchers using empirical methods.Thus,our paper is trying to examine the issues about users’ behavior,community evolution and innovation evaluation in the user innovation paradigm,and our empirical results would make guidelines for firms to leverage external innovation resources and manage the user innovation paradigm better.We first make a literature review and figure out the concepts,characteristics and elements of the user innovation paradigm.According to the practicing problems facing by users,communities and firms,we summarize three research questions.Then,we build our theoretical model and test the hypotheses using different empirical methods.Finally,we discuss our findings and their implications for research and practice.First,we examine the factors influencing users’ continuance intention to innovate.Based on user innovation theory and social interaction theory,we analyze the antecedents of user’ continuance intention to innovate from the individual and community level.Specifically,the factors in the individual level includes trend leadership,perceived enjoyment and perceived reputation,while the factors in the community level includes commitment,reciprocity and feedback.We also examine the moderating effects of innovation toolkits.The results of our survey of actual innovators of an online game community report that all factors in the individual and community level have positively effects on users’ continuance intention to innovate and innovation toolkits,including exploration and ease of effort,plays an important role in lowering the innovation threshold and enhancing the actual innovation behavior.Second,we examine the nonlinear relationship between diversity and team performance.Following prior related research and considering the specific characteristics of online context,we distinguish three types of diversity,namely language separation,skill variety and contribution disparity,and two kinds of team performance,namely firm-oriented performance and community-oriented performance.Considering the collaborative technologies supported by online communities,we hypothesize that the relationships between diversity and team performance are nonlinear.Analyzing a publicly dataset that includes 4110 collaborative innovations spanning five years gathered from an online game community by logistic regression and weighted least squares estimation,we demonstrate that different types of diversity have different nonlinear effects on different kinds of team performance.Our results provide valuable guidelines for firms to manage these online innovation groups.Third,we examine the factors that influence firms’ adoption decision on user innovations.Based on resource-based theory,we build a research model and propose that the value and rareness of a user innovation are the primary determinants of adoption likelihood.Specifically,we use innovation characteristics,innovator characteristics and presentation characteristics to measure the value of a user innovation and demand-supply ratio to measure rareness of a user innovation.Applying logistic regression on a secondary dataset of 21557 user innovations spanning five years collected from Dota 2 workshop,the results show that the popularity,integrity and maintenance of innovation,as well as the prior adoption experience of the innovator,have positive effect on the adoption likelihood.Moreover,the complexity of a user innovation and descriptive images have an inverse U relationship with adoption likelihood.Last,rareness of a user innovation has a positive effect on the adoption likelihood.