Differential Innovativeness Outcomes of User and Employee Participation in an Online User Innovation Community

Abstract

Firm-hosted online user innovation communities (OUICs) have emerged as a vital source of knowledge and expertise for innovation and new product development. Prior research on OUICs has primarily focused on participation of external product users and benefits obtained from their contributions. However, the role of internal employees of the host firm, albeit essential for the community’s long-term success, has not yet received much attention. This study attempts to bridge this gap by investigating the innovation outcomes of employees participating in OUICs. By analyzing a longitudinal data set collected from Salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange community, we find that accessing product user ideas with diverse and well-codified content drives idea promotion and generation of participating employees. Moreover, ideas contributed and promoted by employees are more likely to be implemented than those contributed and only promoted by product users. We discuss important implications of our study for the online innovation community literature and for the development of overall employee engagement in OUICs.

Key words:

• and phrases: Online user innovation communities
• employee innovativeness
• crowdsourcing
• co-creation
• online communities
• online ideation

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ Following previous literature [e.g., 22, 23, 50], we adopt the term “online user innovation communities”; other studies also use terms such as “crowdsourcing” [6] and “value co-creation” [12].

² There were ideas commented and/or voted on by multiple employees; of the 8,088 ideas, 6,327 are distinct ideas.

³ To further evaluate the reliability of the coding procedure, we hired an independent rater to code a subsample of 1,000 ideas (~12%), resulting in a Cohen’s Kappa score of 0.71.

⁴ We used the “https://readability-score.com/text/” website to help calculate the readability score; embedded pictures/figures/links were not entered for calculation.

⁵ When categorizing the ideas, we based the evaluation on the overall degree of support rather than the number of comments. For instance, ideas receiving both positive argument(s) and positive comment(s) were categorized as positive argument.

⁶ The Shannon Wiener diversity index is largely used in the fields of ecology, evolution and environmental biology to measure species diversity in a community [52].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jie (Kevin) Yan

Jie (Kevin) Yan ([email protected]; corresponding author) is an assistant professor in the Department of Supply Chain, Information Systems and Analytics at Dalton State College. He received his Ph.D. in Information Systems from Baylor University. Previously, he worked over 6 years for Telecom and Datacom companies, including Ericsson AB, Cisco Systems and General Electric. His research focuses on cloud computing, IT consumerization, and online user innovation communities.

Dorothy E. Leidner

Dorothy E. Leidner ([email protected]) is the Ferguson Professor of Information Systems at Baylor University and a visiting professor at the Lund University. She has been also a regular summer visiting professor at the University of Mannheim. She received her Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Leidner is widely published in such journals as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, Organization Science, among others. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of MISQ Executive and Senior Editor for Information Systems Research and Journal of the Association of Information Systems. She has held various editorial roles in other journals.

Hind Benbya

Hind Benbya ([email protected]) is Professor of Information Technology (IT) and Innovation Management at Montpellier Business School, France. Her research and consulting consist in developing frameworks and tools for implementing and evaluating complex IT to support knowledge and innovative work. Her work appears or is forthcoming in top academic journals such as MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Journal of Information Technology; as well as top practitioner journals such as MIT Sloan Management Review and MISQ Executive. Dr. Hind is author or co-editor of four books. She has been a visiting academic at the UCLA-Anderson Business School and at the London School of Economics and is a recipient of several best paper awards.