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The world has entered an era of big data-driven digital economies, where high-value big data have given rise to the development of many new industries and business models and led to a more turbulent external environment. Unpredictable market demand and rapid iterating on disruptive technologies have put forward higher requirements for high-tech enterprises’ technology commercialization capability (TCC). TCC is an enterprise’s ability to transform technologies or ideas into products or services that match market demand (Kirchberger & Pohl, 2016; Shan et al., 2021; Zahra & Nielsen, 2002), which has become the lifeblood of high-tech enterprises to shape their competitive advantage and achieve multiplier growth (Chen et al., 2011). However, not all novel technologies can be successfully developed and achieved. The ability of high-tech enterprises to commercialize technologies is generally insufficient due to unfavorable factors such as resources shortages and lack of market information (Chen, 2009; Zahra & Nielsen, 2002). Accordingly, it has become an important issue of practice and academic concern for high-tech enterprises to improve their TCC through the purposeful integration and reconfiguration of internal and external resources and capabilities in order to adapt to the highly complex external environment (Helfat & Peteraf, 2003; Teece, 2007).
The rapid development of emerging technologies such as big data and cloud computing make internal and external knowledge sharing between high-tech enterprises more convenient and efficient; dynamic actors with different goals and resources could co-innovate and greatly improve the innovation efficiency of high-tech enterprises (Briel et al., 2018; Nambisan et al., 2017). As that is the terminal goal of technology commercialization, users’ data, information, and creativity have become scarce valuable resources of high-tech enterprises (Kuang et al., 2019; Vargo & Lusch, 2010), which provide a new way to improve TCC.
User engagement is the behavior in which users share and contribute information in various forms, actively provide creative ideas, test new products and services, and finally influence the commercialization level of enterprises (Fang et al., 2008; Nambisan & Baron, 2010). User engagement broadens the information source channels of high-tech enterprises and provides more choices for these enterprises to obtain high-quality product ideas, screen and evaluate ideas, and form preliminary new product concepts (Dong & Sivakumar, 2017). Thus, improving the ability of high-tech enterprises to adjust the application groups and market categories of products and services becomes timely. Therefore, user engagement helps high-tech enterprises to acquire heterogeneous resources and knowledge; meanwhile, it helps enterprises to grasp market preferences, thus becoming a means for more high-tech enterprises to improve their TCC. For instance, Facebook started rewarding apps that engage users more (Claussen et al., 2014), and Xiaomi, the well-known Chinese high-tech enterprise, established “Xiaomi Community.” However, scholars have not conducted extensive research on the important role of user engagement in improving high-tech enterprises’ TCC, especially in the digital context, which lacks theoretical insights.