User innovation evaluation: Empirical evidence from an online game community

摘要

User innovation community – as a ground for open innovation – has been widely deployed by firms to leverage external sources of innovation. Obtaining contributions from external users, however, poses screening challenges in front of a firm, particularly when such contributions are enormously large in number. Therefore, this study attempts to help firms reduce their workload by examining the differences between adopted and non-adopted user innovations. Based on the prior research, we build a holistic research model by identifying four characteristics of a user innovation: innovation-related, innovator-related, presentation-related and rareness that may influence the evaluation process. The results of logistic regression on a publicly available dataset of 21,557 user innovations spanning five years collected from an online game UIC show that the popularity, integrity and maintenance of the innovation, as well as the prior adoption experience of the innovator, positively influence the adoption of a user innovation by the firm. Moreover, both the complexity of a user innovation and descriptive images have an inverted U-shaped relationship with the adopted innovation. Finally, adopted user innovations have high levels of rareness than non-adopted user innovations. We discuss our findings and implications of this study to research and practice.