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Management response and user idea generation: evidence from an online open innovation community

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Abstract

In recent years, open innovation communities (OICs), in which users are allowed to post ideas, have become a momentous source of product innovation and development for enterprises. Continuous generation of ideas is critical to the success of an OIC. When users post an idea more than once, they are considered to be conducting re-innovation behavior (RIB). Many enterprises have implemented management response systems in their OICs to motivate users’ RIB and promote the prosperity of the OIC. However, researchers have not yet examined whether management response is an effective management tool for motivating users’ RIB in OICs. This research shows that receiving management response has a positive effect on the volume, quality and novelty of user’s RIB. Furthermore, we found that the enterprise’s official adoption willingness expressed through management response may reduce the volume, quality, and novelty of ideas in user’s RIB, which may have an impact on the enterprise’s insights. Additionally, we conducted heterogeneity analyses to explore the effects of different lengths and sentiments of management response in this mechanism. This research has implications for managers and enterprises and contributes to the literature on management response, idea generation behavior, OICs, and, more broadly, co-innovation between enterprises and consumers.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Program for Innovative Research Team of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (IRTSHUFE).

Funding

Funding was provided by the National Social Science Foundation of Shanghai (Grant No. 2018BGL026) and Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71911156).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Management and Engineering, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Dongmei Han, Zhiliang Pang, Lifeng He & Xiaohang Zhou

  2. Faculty of Business Information, Shanghai Business School, Shanghai, 201400, China

    Dongmei Han

  3. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Financial Information Technology, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Dongmei Han

  4. Shanghai Business School, Shanghai, 201400, China

    Shaohua Zhang

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  1. Dongmei Han
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Correspondence to Lifeng He.

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Han, D., Pang, Z., He, L. et al. Management response and user idea generation: evidence from an online open innovation community. Inf Technol Manag 24, 381–400 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-022-00381-9

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