Research On The Interactive Effects Between Open Innovative Community’s Management Mechanism And Customer Competence

New business models are constantly emerging in the digital age,and customers’ unique production value is highlighted through digital channels by involving product design,innovation,promotion and other business links.Scholars often regard such kind of customers as “Partial employees”,“Unpaid employees” or“Working customers”,and call for developing customer value comprehensively.However,customers can not be treated as employees in that enterprises do not have to pay higher human cost and even freely make full use of this kind of labor force in most cases,but it is difficult to control this “unpaid labor” effectively due to the lack of formal labor relations.With the development of technologies,such as big data and artificial intelligence,a variety of digital solutions are providing to this problem,including the Open Innovative Communities(OIC)led by enterprises.In OIC,in order to achieve the goal of collaborative innovation,enterprises can extensively attract customers to participate in,and utilize flexible and diverse community management mechanisms to effectively manage community user behavior.Due to its obvious advantages,OIC is developing rapidly and well-known communities are emerging.Although some OICs have a good development momentum,most OICs still have low utilization ratio,low contribution,low vitality,and other problems,which can not achieve the enterprise expectations of efficient integration of customer capabilities.It sows that there is still a lack of cognition and understanding of the behavioral logic of customers under the production role,and in-depth exploration is needed on how to effectively manage the process of customer digital participation.Since OIC is a capability integrated system in essence,the establishment of OIC management mechanism is carried out around customers’ capability.Hereby,following basic questions are raised in this study: first,whether customer capability will affect the effectiveness of OIC community management mechanism;second,if there is a significant influence,what are the specific pattern of manifestation and rules;third,what is the underlying mechanism of this effect?Based on the above three questions and the research path of value co-creation theory,this study firstly analyzes two basic OIC management mechanisms from the behavioral level,that is the interaction effect of recognition mechanism,incentive mechanism and customer capability;on this basis,the psychological process of community management mechanism affecting user behavior is deeply explored.Therefore,three related sub-studies are formed,which respectively analyze the interaction effect of OIC recognition mechanism and customer capability,OIC incentive mechanism and customer capability,and the mediating role of competency-based virtual matching perception in the process of OIC management mechanism influencing customers’ community contribution behavior.Sub-study 1 analyzed the impact of customer competence and community recognition mechanism of OIC on customer community contribution behavior from the perspective of customer behavior participation.As a kind of open virtual community,the high mobility of OIC users brings difficulties to management.The OIC community recognition mechanism recognition mechanism is the basic community management module to identify and approve customer community behavior,which has significant sense on exactly commanding dynamics of users,effectively identifying useful information,,and hierarchically and categorically managing community users.According to the model of action of the effect of recognition mechanism,this study divides it into two sorts: process recognition and result recognition.Meanwhile,customer competence in the co-innovation context is subdivided into two dimensions: innovation competence and participation competence.Based on the actual user behavior data collected by Python crawler,the influence of interaction of two groups of independent variables on customers’ active and passive contribution behaviors is deeply analyzed.According to research findings,both customer competence and OIC recognition mechanism have a significant impact on customer community contribution behavior,but the specific effects are different.When the dependent variable is the active contribution behavior,the two recognition mechanisms interact with customer innovation capability,and there is a significant positive effect on the active contribution behavior,indicating that innovation capability is not sensitive to the recognition mechanism.When the dependent variable is the passive contribution behavior,the process recognition mechanism has a positive effect,and the interaction between the two kinds of customer capability and the process recognition mechanism has a significant positive effect on the passive contribution behavior,while the result recognition mechanism has no significant effect on the passive contribution behavior.Sub-study 2 focuses on the behavioral results of customers’ participation in community activities under different community incentive mechanisms,and analyzes the interaction effect incentive mechanism and customer capability in detail by using the actual customer behavior data collected from the innovation community homepage of Haier.According to the different requirements of community activity to customer competence,this study divides the community activity into innovation activities and innovation support activities.In the meantime,based on the uses and gratification theory and the existing incentive research results of gamified motivation,OIC incentive method can be divided into five categories:material incentive,emotional incentive and socializing incentive,pleasure incentive and achievement incentive.The empirical results show that only the material incentive gives boost to the two kinds of activities,and the influence of other incentive methods on the activity effect varies with the type of activity.Achievement incentive plays a significant role in innovation activities,but emotional incentive,socializing incentive and pleasure incentive have nonsignificant incentive effects.However,emotional incentive,socializing incentive and pleasure incentive have significant and positive incentive effects in innovation support activities,while achievement incentive does not work well.The reason why the incentive effect is different in different activities is that innovation activities require customers’ innovation competence,while innovation support activities pay more attention on customers’ higher participation competence.Because of the hierarchical nature of incentives,the basic material(virtual currency)incentive means is effective in both kinds of activities,but the design of higher level incentive mechanism needs to consider the problem of matching with customers’ competence.In sub-study 3,the primary data collected from questionnaire survey are used to explore the deep reasons why customer capability affected the difference in the effect of community management mechanism from the perspective of psychological mechanism.According to personal-environment matching theory,the user virtual community perception can be divided into three levels from the perspective of customer competence,including demand matching perception,competence matching perception and value matching perception,meanwhile,in the light of the direction of force,the community management mechanism is divided into supporting and controlling,and the structural model of community management mechanism--user matching perception--community contribution behavior is constructed under SOR framework.The empirical results show that the competence matching perception effectively promotes users’ active contribution behavior,and plays a mediating role in the process of supporting mechanism influencing the active contribution behavior,but it does not affect the passive contribution behavior;demand matching perception and value matching perception have more remarkable effects on passive contribution behavior,and the value matching perception plays a mediating role in the supporting mechanism influencing passive contribution behavior.The supporting mechanism has a significant positive effect on users’ demand matching perception,competence matching perception and value matching perception.Community controlling mechanism is a necessity of community working,though,it only has a positive effect on the demand matching perception,but has no significant effect on the competence matching perception,value matching perception,and the two types of user contribution behaviors,and no mediating effect exists.The analysis of the process of psychological matching perception reveals the reasons why the heterogeneity of the effect of community management mechanism exists,and also enlightens to rationally arrange community management mechanism,and guides and encourages customers to make more contributions.The innovative points of this study are shown as follows:Firstly,this study further extends the existing discussion on the role of consumer production,clearly puts forward the concept of consumer production capability,and puts forward two dimensions of customer capability: innovation capability and participation capability,and creatively makes a quantitative research,which provides a theoretical basis for hierarchically and categorically managing community users of open innovation community.Secondly,this study introduces customer capability into the research of customer incentive system in virtual community,and puts forward a digital incentive system based on the actual characteristics of digital users and communities,and empirically tests the effectiveness of the matching incentive measures of customeroriented capability types.This paper expands the research approach of this field and brings new enlightenment for related management practice.Lastly,this study puts forward an analytical perspective of taking enterpriseled open communities as “quasi-organizations” and community users as“prospective employees”.Based on the human-environment matching theory,a three-dimensional framework of cognitive matching is constructed,which enriches the research on customers’ participation in co-innovation mechanism.Totally,through the discussion of the relationship between community mechanism and customer competence matching,this study deeply reveals the detailed mechanism for enterprises to obtain and utilize external customer human resources via digital measure(OIC)and verifies the management feasibility of customers’ total value development,which provides a new analytical perspective for the study of customer participation co-innovation,and has certain reference value for the vigorous development of enterprises’ open innovation practice.