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Incorporating users into the innovation process helps reduce the innovation risk and innovation cost of the enterprise and represents a significant innovation form for enterprise product research and development (R&D) (Ho-Dac, 2020; Lin et al., 2022; Ogink & Dong, 2019). A large amount of user-generated content (UGC) on the Internet provides user information from the perspective of the consumer, helps product designers better understand consumer preferences, and becomes a major source of enterprise product innovation (Liu et al., 2017).
Some enterprises have established open innovation communities (OIC) to collect user demand information more conveniently (Yan et al., 2018; Qi et al., 2021) and make product improvements based on user requirements, thus, enhancing product competitiveness (Elia et al., 2020; Shaikh & Levina, 2019). However, the proliferation of UGC in OIC has resulted in information overload. Take the MIUI community as an example, the community contains more than 160 discussion boards for different products, and the number of posts in various product discussion boards exceeds 100,000, among which the number of posts in the “MIUI System” discussion board is as high as 6 million. Faced with the massive amount of information, it is difficult for enterprises to efficiently filter and utilize ideas to make innovative decisions (Lee et al., 2018; Lin et al., 2022). Many enterprises do not have clear standards for evaluating the ideas proposed by users and lack a systematic evaluation process (Li et al., 2016). The effective adoption of valuable ideas from the overwhelming amount of information is emerging as a critical issue for enterprises (Yang & Han, 2021). Some studies have discussed how to extract valuable information from user ideas to improve the information processing speed of enterprises (Ireland & Liu, 2018; Jiao & Qu, 2019). These studies mainly focused on the technical realization of extracting product evaluations from user ideas. A few studies have concentrated on the relationship between user ideas and product innovation (Zhang et al., 2018), discussing which characteristics of user ideas can be adopted for product innovation (Li et al., 2016). However, these studies focus on the judgment of the usefulness of user ideas or the possibility of adopting user ideas in the process of idea collection, ignoring the results of the actual adoption of user ideas. Specifically, they may lack a discussion of the complete adoption mechanism from possible adoption to actual adoption.
To improve the status of existing studies on the separation between the perceived usefulness of ideas and the actual adoption of ideas, and to assist enterprises to solve the problems of inefficient screening of ideas in the idea collection stage and the lack of criteria for evaluating ideas in the idea application stage, this paper divides the adoption process of user ideas in OIC into the idea collection stage and the idea application stage, according to the operation mode of OIC, and proposes the following research questions: In the user idea collection stage, what factors affect the judgment on the usefulness of user ideas? In the user idea application stage, how are those ideas considered useful by product designers applied to product improvement, what are the factors that affect the results of the actual adoption of user ideas by the enterprise? To address the aforementioned questions, we build the User Idea Adoption Model for the Open Innovation Community (OIC-UIAM) based on the theory of information adoption model (IAM) and use the user ideas data from the Xiaomi MIUI community, a well-known OIC in China where users contribute ideas to improve Xiaomi products and to empirically analyze the mechanism of enterprises adopting user ideas in two stages.