An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Network Position On Customer Innovation Behavior In Customer Community

With the boundaries of firms becoming blurred,more and more firms start to manage and utilize customer knowledge,which has gotten much attention of firms and scholars as an external source for firms' innovation.As early as 1970s,some firms in the banking industry of American have utilized their customers' knowledge to innovate their products.But the attention of scholars has been paid just till 2004 when "Service-Dominant logic" was put forward by Vargo and Lusch.Nowadays,informatization has given firms more power to get their customers,which makes more firms proceed their customer innovation practice.In firms' practical activities,the most common way to do customer innovation is to build customer communities managing customer knowledge,such as Mi community of Mi corporation,Meizu community and Flyme community of Meizu corporation,and Haier community of Haier corporation.In these communities,customers can communicate with each other about the products of the firm,and the firm can do customer innovations to enhance his innovation ability.Besides,with Internet becoming more popular,users interact much deeper in the customer community,which makes the social network features emerge in the community.Based on the social network theory,actors located on the positions of centres and structural holes have a better innovation ability.In building communities,firms,main purpose is to get the actual customer innovation product,which makes the special actors important for the firm.However,the special positions make the actors more innovative,that doesn't mean they will make more innovation product,which is what firms care most.So how to make the capable actors produce more innovation product is a question that the firm operating community pays more attention to.As to customers,their pro-firm behavior.often occurs when they are satisfied with the firm's services or products.While in customer community,the satisfaction just appears as the experience customers have,which will be different for customers occupying different position,which can bring different information and resources for the customer.Based on the above,the paper studies the relationship between customer network positions and customers innovation behaviors with the perspective of community experience.The study crawls the interaction relations between October 19,2016 and April 19,2017 of Mi community and recognizes the social network structure of these interaction relations,including calculating actors' centrality and structure hole attributes.Following the data crawling,the study gives out surveys to the members of Mi community in a month between April 19 to May 16,2017 to make sure a good forecasting effect of the social network data.After the final matched 254 data of survey and network data,the study does statistic analysis to explore the research questions.After the analysis with SmartPLS,the structural equation model software based on partial least squares,the study gets conclusions as follows:First,actors who occupying centre positions in the community have a better entertainment experience and interactive experience.Second,actors who occupying structural hole positions in the community have a better entertainment experience and interactive experience too.Third,actors who have a better interactive experience do more customer innovation behaviors in the community.Fourth,actors who occupying centre positions or structural hole positions can bring themselves a better interactive experience in the community,which promotes the actors' innovation behaviors.Besides,the study does some further exploration by dividing centrality into in-degree centrality and out-degree centrality,and finds that the centrality which can promote one's community experience is not out-degree centrality which reflects the amount of one's replies received in this study,but in-degree centrality which reflects the amount of one's replies offering in this study.Based on the conclusions,firms should recognize these special position actors and manage them differently;in the score management in the community,firms could increase the score which customers can receive when they interact once to elevate the interaction of the community and to promote each customer's interactive experience;firms can formulate a different experience strategy for the special customers to promote their customer innovation behavior;firms can set some tactics which can encourage customers' replies in the community such as setting "careful comment","make sense" and so on to promote customers' interactive experience.The study does research about the customer innovation behaviors of the special position individuals in customer community,which expands the range of social network theory.Meanwhile,the study is about the special position individuals'innovation behaviors,not about the innovation abilities which other scholars have studies,which expends the social network theory.Besides,as a research about the outside resource about firm's innovation,the study also contributes to the theory about firm's innovation.However,the study still has some limitations,such as the interacting data the study uses maybe just contain weak ties;the matching process between the two source of data may lose some important samples;as the social network theory contains many special structure positions,the study just pays attention to two kinds of them,which may makes the study not complete;the content the concept of community experience contains may be relatively less;the study object just including Mi community may cause a relatively weaker external validity of the conclusions.