Research Of User Innovation Diffusion Based On Small-world Network Theory

Innovation has been defined as the ability of an organization to deliver a continuous stream of relevant products and services to its customers, and the single most important factor in determining one organization's success through the 21st century. The complexity, uncertainty and diversity of the market bring the enterprises great motility to innovate, coincident with the tremendous challenge to innovate, because the result of innovating are probably not accepted by the market. Issued by Professor Eric von Hippel from MIT, the User Innovation Theory describes the method and the idea of innovating from a totally new view, and it attracted wide recognition and application, both among the academic field and the business field in the west.The research result from innovation management researchers presents that, the current innovation process bas become a network process. This paper makes a review to the user innovation theory research firstly, and mainly concludes the innovation sources theory, the leader-user theory, the sticky information and the user innovation toolkit theory, and the user innovation network theory. After this, this paper analyses the spreading of the innovation origin from users——the diffusion of user innovation, importing on important model belong to the complex network theory——small-world network model to model the situation of user innovation adoption,the average level of user innovation knowledge in the network, and the standard deviation of user innovation knowledge in the network. Via Matlab 7.0 tool, the paper simulates the user innovation diffusion in different network configuration. The simulation results say that, diffusion of user innovation presents different results in different network configuration: the proportion of innovation adoption achieves the max in the small-world range; with the increasing of the network stochastic extent, the average innovation knowledge level is higher, and the equably diffusion of knowledge can be achieved faster; the small-world characteristic is easy to show when affected by the characteristic path length and clustering coefficient, and average innovation knowledge level will be the highest in small-world range.In the last part, the paper gives a case study on the OSS (Open Source Software) community, and analyses the main factors of the success of user innovation. It raises related propose, that is, enterprises could fully adopt the user innovation by building relations with the user innovation communities, or construct the similar platform themselves to lead and activate the forming of user innovation network...