Stimulating Innovation on Social Product Development: An Analysis of Social Behaviors in Online Innovation Communities

With firms’ increasing adoption of social product development strategies, such as mass collaboration and crowdsourcing, online users are actively participating in the development of new products and services via social media platforms. Online innovation communities (OICs), one representative of such social media platforms, have been used by large firms to collect ideas from their users and facilitate the product development process. While it is extensively studied that product ideas with high popularity on OICs are of great importance to the product development, research on what social behaviors of online users lead to the high popularity is largely unclear. This article conducts an empirical study by collecting a large-scale, quantitative dataset from an OIC between 2014 and 2018. With the analysis of users’ online idea posting and commenting behaviors, our results reveal that the idea contribution experience, together with comment diversity, positively influence the overall popularity of an individual’s ideas, while the motivation of providing comments is negatively related. Moreover, user’s innovation capability poses a positive effect on both overall and average popularity of ideas. These findings can help firms better incentivise their users on OICs to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of social product development.