Research On The Continuous Idea Contribution Of Firm-hosted Open Innovation Platform

With the development of digital technologies,the innovation paradigm has gradually evolved from traditional closed innovation to open innovation,which coordinates internal and external resources.Numerous enterprises both domestically and internationally have invested in and established Open Innovation Platforms(OIP)to involve external users in the innovation of their products and services,such as MyStarbucksIdea platform of Starbucks,LEGO IDEAS of Lego,HOPE of Haier,MIUI community of Xiaomi,Pollen Club of Huawei,etc.The creation of OIPs has expanded the innovation boundaries of enterprises,allowing more users’ ideas to be integrated into product innovation,effectively helping enterprises reduce R&D costs and improve innovation performance.However,many firm-hosted OIPs still face issues,such as insufficient continuous idea output and subpar quality of ideas,urgently requiring relevant theoretical guidance to further enhance user innovation on the platform.As an internet platform for the general public,firm-hosted OIPs heavily rely on social interactions among users.Users can provide feedback on ideas of interest in the innovation community through commenting and voting,as well as discuss product issues exchange support with other community members in support communities.In recent years,the academic community has begun to pay attention to the relationship between user interaction and user innovation in firm-hosted OIPs.However,current research mostly focuses on the structural features of interactions,with a lack of in-depth exploration and dimensionality breakdown of unstructured feedback content.Additionally,there is limited attention to the diverse forms of interaction in the innovation and support communities of firm-hosted OIPs,and a lack of comprehensive discussion on different forms of interactions.How to give full play to the stimulating effect of social interaction based on diverse forms of interaction and improve users’ continuous idea contribution is an important issue for companies.Based on the aforementioned practical and theoretical background,this paper aims to investigate how different forms of interaction affect users’ continuous idea contribution,(including both the quantity and quality of ideas),in order to help companies refine and fully utilize user interaction mechanisms to enhance users’ continuous idea contribution levels.Specifically,this paper conceptualizes user interaction behaviors in the innovation community and support community of firm-hosted OIPs as idea-based interactions and question-based interactions.The core research question of this article is how to improve users’ continuous idea contribution level based on different forms of interaction in the firm-hosted OiP.Based on the individual creativity theory,creative self-efficacy theory and the SIAM model,this paper discusses the individual impacts of the two types of interaction on users’ continuous idea contribution from the perspectives of direct effect and spillover effect,and analyzes the combined impact of the two types of interaction on users’ continuous idea contribution from the perspective of complementary effect.In this paper,direct effects refer to a direct influence relationship,representing a direct correlation between idea-based interactions and idea contributions that simultaneously occur in the innovation community.Spillover effects refer to unintended effects,signifying that question-based interactions in the support community can unconsciously produce indirect impacts on idea contribution behaviors in the innovation community,meaning that direct and spillover effects imply the relative positional relationship between influencers and those being influenced.Complementary effects in this paper indicate that users participating in both types of interactions can lead to higher idea contributions.The main work and conclusions of this paper are summarized below.Firstly,this paper explores the direct effect of idea-based interactions in the innovation community on users’ continuous idea contributions.Feedback of ideas in the innovation community is an essential social factor that affects users’ contributions.In response to the current research status and shortcomings of idea-based interactions,this paper focuses on the content of the idea-based interactions,captures a rich panel dataset containing 15,649 users from the OIP of Salesforce,and uses natural language processing and deep learning classification tools to obtain language features of interaction content.Combining regression methods,such as negative binomial regression and OLS regression,the study explores the underlying reasons for the influence of idea-based interactions on users’ continuous idea contributions.The empirical results show that emotional recognition has a significant positive impact on both the quantity and quality of users’ continuous idea contributions,while personalized concern does not play a role.In terms of constructive feedback,the results show that cognitive stimulation and intellectual stimulation have a positive impact on users’continuous idea contributions.The difference is that intellectual stimulation can only affect the quality of ideas and not the quantity of ideas.In addition,the results point out the positive moderating roles of content concreteness and verbal persuasion provider’s status.Concrete comments can make the above impact stronger,and similarly,comments from opinion leaders also have a stronger promoting effect.Secondly,this paper explores the spillover effect of question-based interactions in the support community on users’ continuous idea contributions.Support communities serve as another section in the firm-hosted OIP besides innovation communities,hosting mutual assistance activities(i.e.,help giving and help seeking)among users.It also provides users with a wealth of needs and means information,which is conducive to the activation of knowledge and the proposal of ideas.From the perspective of spillover effect,this paper first discusses whether question-based interactions can affect users’ continuous idea contributions,and then further analyzes how the breadth and depth of interactions influenced users’continuous idea contributions.By crawling panel data of 4131 users in the OIP of Salesforce,this paper applies quasi natural experiments and fixed effect regression for empirical testing.The results show that,after participating in the question-based interactions within support communities,the quantity and quality of users’ subsequent idea contributions both exhibit a significant upward trend,demonstrating the positive spillover effect of engaging in question-based interactions within support communities.Furthermore,the breadth of interactions is positively related to the idea contribution level of users,while the depth of interactions is demonstrates an inverted U-shaped relationship with the idea contribution level of users.In addition,in the case of help seeking,the breadth of interaction can moderate the inverted U-shaped relationship between interaction depth and users’ idea contributions,which verifies the methods proposed by previous studies to mitigate the negative effects of cognitive fixation.Thirdly,this paper explores the complementary effect of idea-based and question-based interactions in the firm-hosted OIP on users’ continuous idea contributions.Building on the first two parts of the research,this paper utilizes the qualitative comparative analysis based on fuzzy sets(fsQCA)method to investigate how the combination of different forms of interaction can lead to high levels of continuous idea contributions from the perspective of configuration analysis.Subsequently,an econometric model is established to supplement the research on complementary effects by adding negative binomial regression analysis with interactive terms.The research results show that there are three different conditional configurations in each of the quantity and quality of users’ high-level continuous idea contributions,which include the combination of idea-based interactions and question-based interactions.More importantly,this combination has a higher degree of unique coverage and offers stronger explanatory power to the model.This result supports the assumption of complementary effects between the two types of interaction in this paper.In addition,the variable representing user participation in question-based interactions within support communities and its interaction terms with emotional support and constructive feedback are all significantly positive,further indicating their complementarity.Through combining configuration analysis and regression analysis,this study confirms the complementary effect of idea-based and question-based interactions on users’ continuous idea contribution.Finally,according to the analysis results of the empirical study and the current situation of firm-hosted OIP operation,this paper proposes strategies and suggestions to promote the continuous idea contribution of firm-hosted OIP users from the perspective of user interaction design and management of innovation communities and support communities.