Who creates value in a user innovation community? A case study of MyStarbucksIdea.com

Successful open innovation requires that many ideas be posted by a number of users and that the posted ideas be evaluated to find ideas of high quality. As such, successful open innovation community would have inherently information overload problem. The purpose of this paper is to mitigate the information problem by identifying potential idea launchers, so that they can pay attention to their ideas.

This research chose MyStarbucksIdea.com as a target innovation community where users freely share their ideas and comments. We extracted basic features from idea, comment and user information and added further features obtained from sentiment analysis on ideas and comments. Those features are used to develop classification models to identify potential idea launchers, using data mining techniques such as artificial neural network, decision tree and Bayesian network.

The results show that the number of ideas posted and the number of comments posted are the most significant among the features. And most of comment-related sentiment features found to be meaningful, while most of idea-related sentiment features are not in the prediction of idea launchers. In addition, this study show classification rules for the identification of potential idea launchers.

This study dealt with information overload problem in an open innovation context. A large volume of textual customer contents from an innovation community were examined and classification models to mitigate the problem were proposed using sentiment analysis and data mining techniques. Experimental results show that the proposed classification models can help the firm identify potential idea launchers for its efficient business innovation.