A Comparative Study of Online User Communities Involvement In Product Innovation and Development

Customer’s involvement in product development process, especially in idea generation, product conceptualization and the prototyping, has been examined in several literatures. It is well-known that “online user communities” have provided a firm to leverage the creativity of its customers in all stages of the product development process. Nevertheless, the literature lacks a conceptual understanding on how different types of online user communities can influence the product innovation and development. In this study, “online user communities” are classified, by their characteristic of community members and interaction level, into five types: virtual customer community, beta testing volunteer corps, user content collaboration innovation community, user development community and user product collaboration innovation community. Within these online user communities, we find that (1) different online user communities can be used at different stage of product development. It is more noteworthy that “user product collaboration innovation community” can be used at all stages of the product development process, especially in design & engineer phase that less explored in literatures. (2) firms play a supporting /complementary role within “user collaboration innovation community” in contrast to the rest online user communities.(3) there is a significant difference between the five type communities in knowledge creation, sharing and diffusion.(4) there are some implications of “user product collaboration innovation community” which pushes the firms to justify their organizational governing mechanism, in contrast to the rest online user communities. Finally, we conclude that all these ways of investigation would naturally lead into very interesting issues of innovation management and organizational innovation.

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