Exploring users motivation in innovation communities

Abstract

A rapid growth of technologies supporting user interaction on the Internet, such as social networking sites and other virtual communities, can be seen today. These virtual communities have been shown to be of great value to companies that want to involve users in their innovation processes. However, in order to guide organisations on how to utilise their innovation intermediary communities, more knowledge is needed regarding who they are and their motivational drivers for participating in a community. The aim of this paper therefore is to explore who the users are and what motivates them to contribute to innovation processes in an innovation intermediary community. The main findings of our study indicate that users' motivation to participate is influenced by community type as well as technology adoption type. This study show that in innovation intermediary communities, one important motivational factor for users is learning.

How to engage customers in co-creation: customers’ motivations for collaborative innovation

“…According to Ståhlbröst and Bergvall-Kåreborn (2011), these innovation platforms can be classified into five generic types: brand communities, beta-test communities, user content communities, innovation intermediary communities and development communities. Brand communities are defined by Muniz and O'Guinn (2001) as a specialized, non-geographically bound community based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of the brand.…”

“…In these virtual communities, users both produce and consume information in a voluntary and democratic manner (Ståhlbröst & Bergvall-Kåreborn, 2011). These customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions are extremely powerful marketing tools.…”

The Grey Areas Between Open and Closed in Innovation Networks

“…Extrinsic motivations concern all actions that lead, directly or indirectly, to economic advantages for the contributor. The reward incentives include monetary rewards (Antikainen et al, 2010), free products (Ståhlbröst & Bergvall-Kåreborn, 2011), and sharing of intellectual property rights (Battistella & Nonino, 2012).…”

Innovation without me: why employees do (not) participate in organizational innovation communities

“…We do this by combining the findings of these three streams and by presenting a categorization. Our analysis of the existing motivation literature from all three streams shows that the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivational factors is widely adopted (Hars and Ou, ; Lakhani and Wolf, ; Rossi, ; Roberts et al., ; Oreg and Nov, ; Ståhlbröst and Bergvall‐Kåreborn, ). Thus, we use this distinction as well and structure our literature review accordingly.…”