Stimulating innovation: Managing peer interaction for idea generation on digital innovation platforms

Abstract This study investigates user behaviours in online innovation communities which are enabled by digital technologies, to obtain an understanding of the relationship between user's social interaction and their innovation contribution. The new type of innovation communities enables firms to crowdsource ideas from their users for developing new products and improving existing ones, and to facilitate the interactions among users. From an empirical study which collects a large-scale, quantitative data set from Microsoft's Idea platform of Business Intelligent products, this paper focuses on the amount and diversity of users' social interaction particularly their commenting behaviours on the platform, and uses the number of posted ideas and the number of implemented ideas to capture users' contribution to the firm's innovation development. The findings indicate that the amount of user interaction is positively related to the number of implemented ideas, but has an inverted U-shaped relationship with idea number. Moreover, diverse user interaction encourages idea posting, but is negatively associated with the number of implemented ideas. The findings should provide managerial guidance to firms on incentivising and managing user interaction in online communities in order to improve firms' innovation development.