Research On User Contribution And Innovation Management Of Open Innovation Community

In the era of information economy,knowledge diffusion is speeding up,technology spillover effect is strengthening,product life cycle is shortening,and user demands are diversifying,which leads to the traditional closed innovation model have shown its limitations gradually.In order to better implement the strategy of innovation-driven development,enterprises will no longer rely on their own strength,but cross the organizational boundaries,and make a comprehensive use of internal and external innovation resources to achieve an open innovation.Internet thinking promotes the deep integration of enterprises' open innovation concept and ICT application.An open innovation community(OIC)based on the Internet comes into being,which represents the new trend of open innovation accepted by the enterprises.At present,OIC has become an important node in the process of enterprise innovation.More and more companies can interact with external users effectively through OIC and make the best use of user-generated content(UGC)in OIC which has low cost and high quality to promote the implementation of open innovation models.However,with the rapid development and wide application of OIC,the scale of online users will continue to expand and UGC has become increasingly complex and diverse.Nevertheless,the manpower,material and financial resources are limited,and UGC's adoption and implementation still lacks a set of systematic procedures and methods,which increases the difficulty for enterprises to manage OIC.Negative UGC will not only hinder the realization of innovation goals,but also will lead to enterprises' resource wasting,cost increasing,benefit reducing.In view of this,the application of OIC is a double-edged sword for enterprises in that it can not only provide better opportunities for the implementation of open innovation,but also make them face some serious challenge which can't happen in the traditional innovation model.Among them,a problem to be solved is how to effectively manage the users and UGC in OIC to promote enterprises' innovation performance under the condition of limited resources.In other words,how does enterprises transform the important resources in OIC to a sustainable competitive advantage?This will become an important issue in the field of OIC research.Focusing on the above core problem,this article makes detailed research from the following four subproblems closely related in logic:First,how does the innovation value chain of OIC operate effectively?That is how to effectively use OIC to promote the implementation of the enterprise's open innovation activities?Second,how do the external users participate in the implementation process of OIC as the ideapublishers in the innovation value chain?Third,how do the internal staff apply the important innovation resources of UGC in OIC as the idea implementers in the innovation value chain?Fourth,what are the key factor influencing the effective operation of OIC's innovation value chain?That is what aspects should the enterprise pay attention to if it wants to change the important innovation resources into sustainable competitive advantage?This research uses comprehensivly the methods of literature analysis,theoretical research,statistical analysis,case analysis and simulation study to make a systematic research on the above problems from the perspective of innovation value chain,based on the theoretical research of open innovation,resource-based view and dynamic capability view,as well as on the data analysis support from Starbucks' OIC.And the following main conclusions have been achieved:(1)OIC innovation value chain includes three stages and six key activities.This study divides the enterprises' open innovation process based on OIC into three stages of ideas' generation,transformation and diffusion,and each stage includes some specific value creation activities.Idea generation stage mainly includes ideas' collection and selection.User ideas are the major form of innovation resources and enterprises must promote the perceptive capacity of market orientaton to obtain valuable information.from the vast amount of ideas.Idea transformation stage mainly includes ideas' absorption and conversion.Employee's innovative solutions are the major form of innovation resources and enterprises must promote the absorptive capacity of organizational learning to increase the success rate of innovation plan formulation.Idea diffusion stage mainly includes ideas' implementation and commercialization.Innovative achievements are the major form of innovation resources and enterprise must promote the innovative capacity for the needs of reform to realize value increment of innovation achivements.(2)OIC user roles mainly include six categories and their contributions are different in the innovation value chain.This study makes clustering analysis on the behaviors of online users of OIC through these four indicators of "Ideas_submitted"?"Ideas_points"?"Comments_submitted" and "Comments_received",drawing six different user groups.And these different user group's contribution value to the enterprise is further studied separately from this two dimensions of their contribution to the enterprise innovation and the community interaction.Finally,it is concluded that there are six different types of online users including core users,positive social users,attractive social users,positive innovation users,effective innovation users and edge users in OIC,who play different roles,have different behavior characteristics and various contribution degree to enterprises in the innovaton value chain.(3)The employees pay more attention to the quality of UGC and less attention to user information in the innovation value chain of OIC.This study analyzes the influence of these four independent variables of "UGC information quality","UGC interaction quality","user innovation behavior" and"user interaction behavior" on the dependent variable of "UGC contribution value"from the two dimensions of idea quality and user behavior,using the adopted user ideas in the OIC of My Starbucks Idea as the analytical unit.The results show that"UGC information quality" and "UGC interactive quality" has a significant positive impact on "UGC contribution value",but the impact of "user innovation behavior"and "user interaction behavior" on "UGC contribution value" is not significant.Finally,the application characteristics of UGC in OIC are further discussed according to the analysis results.And it is found that employees pay more attention to adopt those ideas of high quality,but less attention to the behavior characteristics of idea publishers in the process of using OIC to implement open innovation.(4)The effective operation of OIC innovation value chain is determined by the interaction of the factors in the system.This study firstly proposes the system characteristics of OIC with entireness,purposefulness,structuralness,openness,self-organization and stability,and then divides the enterprises' open innovation system based on OIC into three subsystems of idea generation,idea transformation and idea diffusion according to the analysis of OIC innovation value chain.Secondly,we use the method of system dynamics to study respectively the interaction between the internal factors of these three innovation subsystems,construct the system dynamic flow chart of OIC,and simulate enterprises' open innovation process based on OIC.Finally,the simulation results are analyzed and it is found that users' personalized demans and reward level,user-generated content and enterprises' dynamic capability are the key factors influencing the effective operation of OIC innovation value chain.At the same time,the corresponding management enlightment aiming at the innovation practice and development of OIC for the enterprises.The innovations of this research contain the three aspects as listed below:(1)It constructs the innovation value chain model of OIC which provides a theoretical foundation for enterprises' open innovation research based on OIC.For enterprises,online users are the important innovation sources from outside and UCG created by them when participating in OIC activities is the important resource input of OIC innovation value chain.The success of enterprise innovation depends on its application and management of the user-generated content based on the Internet.This paper considers the enterprises' open innovation process based on OIC as a chain flow formed by a series of value creation activities,and analyzes the specific activity of each stage deeply combining Starbucks OIC application cases,which provides guidance for enterprise using OIC to promote open innovation.(2)It analyzes the contribution of OIC users and their generated content to enterprise innovation from the perspective of multiple subjects and helps enterprises to better understand that OIC plays a very important role in enterprise innovation.Previous researches have only studied OIC simply from the point of view of user innovation or enterprise innovation,ignoring that the innovation process of OIC is actually a collaborative innovation process based on the enterprise-user interaction and the user-user interaction.Therefore,this paper takes the enterprises' OIC as an open innovation system composed of different participants of internal staff and external users.It not only analyzes the contribution of external users who are idea publishers in the activities of OIC innovation value chain from the aspect of user innovation,but also analyzes the application characteristics of the internal staff who are idea implementers to UGC in OIC innovation value chain from the aspect of enterprise innovation.It provides theoretical foundation for enterprises to effectively manage OIC users and their generated contents.(3)It deeply discusses the key factors that affect the innovation behavior of OIC system and the interaction between them and the dynamic evolution process from the perspective of the whole system,according to the innovation value chain analysis of OIC.At present,the research methods of OIC management mainly adopt qualitative or empirical analysis method from static perspective,and most of them are based on linear relationship between independent variables and dependent variables.But in the actual innovation process of OIC,it's not a simple linear relationship between the various factors,but a complex relationship formed by them interacting with each other through a series of value creation activities.Existing statistical analysis methods are difficult to meet the effective analysis of enterprises' OIC innovation value chain system.This paper applies the system dynamics method not only to analyze the causal relationship between the internal components of the three OIC subsystems from the micro level,but also to simulate the dynamic evolution process of the whole system of OIC innovation value chain from the macro level.It has realized the systematic research on the combination of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis,static analysis and dynamic analysis,which provids the important decision basis for the successful operation and sustainable development of OIC.